When to take a social media break

Burning out?

Scoring 'imaginary points'

"It’s the personal interactions, or the lack thereof, that make me feel done, feel more drained than I ever expected. It’s the inability to share my thoughts without seeing countless bad-faith critiques, even from people who fundamentally agree with what I’m saying. It’s the shallowness, the hollowness, the desire to score imaginary points placed above solidarity or building something or even constructive criticism. It’s the endless encounters with raw and misplaced anger with nowhere to channel it. It’s the fury and frustration shot out into the void, or directed at would-be friends."

I'm burnt out on social media: A reflection for supporting readers. Joshua P. Hill. New Means (Substack). February 18, 2024.

'Curating personhood' inside an algorithm

Wanting to take a social media break wasn't due only to the agitation, distraction, the urge to buy things for no reason, the inattention to what is taken and the unmindful plastic waste that resulted, the exposure to angry online trolls. It was also "perception gulfs" like:

"Once, having read of a friend’s mother’s death — movingly detailed in social media posts — I saw that same friend in real life and somehow did not process that she was still grieving.

Conversely, I ran into a friend who seemed happy online, but realized quickly after talking to her in person that she was actually in a very dark place."

There is a "labor of curating personhood in algorithmic space."

"I savored and cultivated something which nobody has figured out how to monetize: A sense of private delight. Indeed, I felt a new sense of private wonder."

"Here’s a phrase that came to me somewhere during my time off: You have a real life, not an advertisement for a life. "

"If I go back online, I only want to post and share what I would want to rain down on me, or a friend, or on the neighbor who one code calls me to love like a self."

Opinion: It’s the first weekend of spring. It’s totally okay to unplug: Tess Taylor, CNN, March 24, 2023

People will find and pay for your work

Even without social media, your email newsletter can speak for itself.

People will pay for material that feels different. They want their subscription to help them achieve their goals and save time. They'll support a person or movement in whom they see value or find meaning. (Ghost) Email subject lines should be short (5–10 words) without many emojis or punctuation, use a consistent personality, and reference your brand name. Avoid the words "free,” “act now,” or “please read" to stay out of spam filters. Use the same sender name (yourself or your business), and send it at the same day/time every week. (Ghost) Turn your writing into audio/video with tools like Wavve and Descript. (Ghost) Once you have some subscribers, you can run contests or introduce a referral program (like FirstPromoter) to get new subscribers. (Ghost)

"You will notice that I’ve not waded into the perennially tiresome discourse about which of Trump’s actions are “distractions” and which ones matter. Not a game worth playing, in my experience.

Personally, it’s been far more helpful to consider the tightrope watch of my own attention. Whatever I’ve done this past week— watching Godzilla’s blitzed-out stumbles and trying to denote a pattern— surely isn’t the answer. But I don’t think there’s much use in shaming myself for feeling dizzy. Everything is real and nothing is real and there is no clear plan and the beast is dying but damnit, it just took out another house. That isn’t theoretically destabilizing. It’s too much. We all, the weary observers and opposers, deserve some grace for not always knowing what to do in the face of it."

— Garrett Bucks, We're living through MAGA'S Drunk Godzilla Era: Trumpism has never been weaker/Trumpism will keep on killing, The White Pages, Apr 14, 2026

'Cruel Optimism': Wanting something that isn't really good for you

Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2011)

The author doesn't use the term "Stockholm syndrome," but that's how I could most succinctly phrase her thesis in Cruel Optimism. Instead of having a love/hate relationship with a person who is your captor, however, you have a love/hate relationship with an idea to which you are captive. Somehow, remaining in the dynamic has come to seem better than the alternative.

Optimism — Berlant says in her Introduction — may be described as “the force that moves you out of yourself and into the world in order to bring closer the satisfying something that you cannot generate on your own but sense in the wake of a person, a way of life, an object, project, concept, or scene.” (What this force feels like is individual and variable.) “Even those whom you would think of as defeated are living beings figuring out how to stay attached to life from within it, and to protect what optimism they have for that, at least.” The term “cruel optimism” means that “something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing,” she says in the Introduction. This happens “when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially,” or, in other words, “when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving.” The feelings involved are also complex. One might feel “pleasures of being inside a relation” despite being “bound to a situation of profound threat”; this, too, is cruel. She is thinking in particular of “the fantasies that are fraying” in the late 20th and 21st centuries, like “upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy,” especially given our modern human condition that is so crisis-filled “that adjustment seems like an accomplishment.”

The period called “the impasse” is when a person “moves around with the sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things, maintain one’s sea legs, and coordinate the standard melodramatic crises with those processes that have not yet found their genre of event.” In terms of the human ability to feel or function, an impasse is “temporary housing,” which is better than altogether falling apart.

A sudden event, yielding an aftermath “when one no longer knows what to do or how to live and yet, while unknowing, must adjust” is one kind of impasse. Another kind is “coasting through” a nameless status quo. (Chapter 6, p. 200)

“All attachments are optimistic.” (Chapter 1, p. 23) They are cruel when they present as "an affectively stunning double bind: a binding to fantasies that block the satisfactions they offer, and a binding to the promise of optimism as such that the fantasies have come to represent. Cruelty is the ‘hard’ in a hard loss. It is apprehensible as an affective event in the form of a beat or a shift in the air that transmits the complexity and threat of relinquishing ties to what’s difficult about the world." (Chapter 2, p. 51) The “double bind” is that “it is awkward and it is threatening to detach from what is already not working,” and that is why we sit in an “impasse of the present.” (Chapter 7, p. 263)

Lauren Berlant. Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011.

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"Tragic optimism," by contrast, "is the ability to maintain hope and find meaning in life despite its inescapable pain, loss and suffering," in the words of Emily Esfahani Smith in the New York Times. The word was coined by Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. She explains: "For a long time, many psychologists embraced a victim narrative about trauma, believing that severe stress causes long-lasting and perhaps irreparable damage to one’s psyche and health." Today, however, psychologists believe that a majority of trauma survivors "exhibit what’s known as post-traumatic growth. After a crisis, most people acquire a newfound sense of purpose, develop deeper relationships, have a greater appreciation of life and report other benefits."

So, "cruel optimism" is when you start off hopeful but life harms you, and "tragic optimism" is when you start off harmed but find hope. Perhaps that is oversimplified, but it seems to boil down to that.

On handling negative emotions with purpose

If we dwell on negative emotions too heavily, they can consume us. "At least one must keep one's head out of it so as not to be eaten up entirely by emotional ape-men," C. G. Jung wrote in a personal letter. But, at low levels, they may simply endure as conditions of our being. "Ressentiment is not rash, but sluggish; it is a mood or a low-energy state in opposition to the vehement nature of violent rage, horror, or grief," wrote Thomas Brudholm. "More interestingly, the diminution over time that seems to be an essential feature of the passions contrasts with the excessive duration or endurance of emotions and memories taken into ressentiment."

Intense negative emotions exist for a reason and are not necessarily bad. They may need to be named and released, not cured or erased. The Zen teacher Alan Watts said: "Such words as anger, depression, fear, grief, anxiety, and guilt suggest uniform states which tend to persist if no action is taken to change or release them. As fever was once considered a disease instead of a natural healing process, we still think of negative feelings as disorders of the mind which need to be cured.
" Releasing them lets us move on, said Martin Laird: "If we can name the thought (anger, fear, pride, etc.) instead of spinning a commentary about the thought, which is our usual response, we stand a much better chance of simply letting go of the thought and returning to our practice."

And even for the moment we experience that feeling, the moment before it subsides, may be important. Sam Keen said, "When the elemental emotions are shrouded or repressed, we cease to experience the sublime nature of all life and we begin to respond to our environment in purely utilitarian ways. Our inborn sense of reverence is occluded, and the dignity of being is replaced by the frenzy of doing. We exchange our sacred birthright for a cultural myth because it promises a secure identity, a necessary role, and a sense of belonging to the tribe." When we choose to experience the feeling consciously, we can direct our actions. Daniel Condron advised that "the more you speak your thoughts as they arise, the more control you have over your thoughts and emotions. The emotions are a way to complete the thoughts; they are not the cause of your thoughts." He continued: "The emotions are not a way to re-act to the world but instead are a way to act or take action in the world."


"To declare that someone’s suffering is “emotional manipulation” rather than genuine distress is an act of power. It attaches suspicion to certain bodies while treating other forms of pain as natural and legitimate. Sara Ahmed’s work on the cultural politics of emotion (2004) is useful here: emotions don’t simply reside inside individuals but circulate through discourse, constituting social boundaries. Anti-empathy rhetoric works by marking specific populations as threats who weaponize feeling, while privileged grievance, the anger of people who feel the culture has left them behind, passes as common sense. There is a deeper anxiety at work, too, though I’m not sure the people involved would recognize it. If we took seriously the suffering of precarious populations — the undocumented worker, the uninsured mother, the trans teenager — we might have to reckon with how our social arrangements produce that suffering. Anti-empathy rhetoric insulates against that recognition. The problem isn’t that empathy is dangerous. The problem is that empathy might reveal something about how our world actually works. Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism” (2011) names the dynamic: we cling to myths of meritocracy precisely because the alternative — recognizing that the system distributes suffering unevenly and often deliberately — is unbearable. Easier not to feel." (The Anti-Empathy Movement & the End of the Iliad, Maximus Planudes, Medium, Feb 17, 2026)

Sources

Thomas Brudholm. Resentment’s Virtue: Jean Améry and the Refusal to Forgive. Philadelphia: Temple, 2008. p. 105.

Letter from C. G. Jung to Jolande Jacobi, 26 August 1943. Printed in C. G. Jung. Aspects of the Masculine. (Collected Works.) Translation by R. F. C. Hull. New York: MJF Books, 1989. p. 126.

Alan Watts. Nature, Man, and Woman. New York: Vintage Books, 1991 (Copyright 1958). p. 92

Sam Keen. In the Absence of God: Dwelling in the Presence of the Sacred. New York: Harmony Books, 2010. p. 79.

Martin Laird, O.S.A. Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. p. 82.

Daniel Condron. Superconscious Meditation: Kundalini and the Understanding of the Whole Mind. Windyville, Missouri: SOM Publishing, 1998. pp. 151-2, 154.

Quotes on masculinity and feeling and expressing emotion

"It is indeed possible to soften men. But to make them 'care' is another thing, and the project must inevitably fail."

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, p. 129

"It is very much in style today to urge men to feel. However, this urging is partially reminiscent of taunting a crippled man to run."

Herb Goldberg, quoted by Starhawk, The Spiral Dance, p. 108

"But a man who is emotionally paralyzed cannot be male, that is, he cannot be male in relation to female, for if he is to relate himself to a woman there must be something of the woman in his nature."

Alan Watts, Nature, Man, and Woman, New York: Vintage Books, 1991 (Copyright 1958). p. 113

"Genetic men, it seems, are taught to deal with the onset of this chemical [testosterone] that makes our feelings so much harder to ignore by getting rigorous, brutal, almost crushing training that frequently forces them out of contact with all their feelings. This is akin to using a nuclear warhead to restrain a werewolf...surely there is a better way?"

Raven Kaldera. Hermaphrodeities: The Transgender Spirituality Workbook. XLibris Press, 2001. p 177.

"Want to tell people about your problems? Get a sex change."

BusterB, http://themenscenter.com/busterb/mythsand.htm, Accessed Dec. 16, 2001.