In Search of Community

Being online, and specifically on social media, in 2026 feels an awful lot like being stuck in an episode of Black Mirror you didn’t consent to watch in the first place. Every part of the experience has been ensh*ttified to the point that it’s barely recognizable as the thing I was once doing for fun. Now, the only thing keeping me there is the inertia of long-established habits, but even that is starting to wear thin. For me, the breaking point is fast approaching, and it has to do with the death of community.

Connection has always been at the core of the work I do as a writer and content creator. The search for community is why I joined social media, and the humanistic values associated with community — authentic human connection, above all — have informed my approach to social media. I have watched capitalism slowly poison the potential of social media, and the internet in general, to deliver those “third spaces” that have been eradicated (also by capitalism) in the non-virtual world. I have persevered, determined to hold on to whatever small pocket of community remained … but, friends, I fear I am losing the battle. Social media, in its current form, no longer connects us — not even in an accidental fashion, while it operates primarily as a marketplace. It now actively dis-connects us, isolating us into empty echo chambers populated by vampire robots whose job it is to extract every nugget of human creativity so it can be repackaged and capitalized by billionaire technocrats.

I know that sounds like overblown ravings but, honestly, it doesn’t even scratch the surface of how bleak it feels to be on social media these days.

Things were bad before, but AI has made them 1000% worse. To participate in social media as a content creator now is to willingly participate in your own exploitation — and for absolutely zero reward. I’m not even talking about monetary compensation. I’m talking about access to your own audience, the people for whom you are creating the content in the first place. The algorithm will make sure they never see it. Meanwhile, AI is given free rein to scrape all your content and do with it God knows what.

The answer — quit social media — has been growing on me for many months now. I have been on Instagram since 2013, almost as long as I’ve been writing this blog. I have met countless of wonderful people through my accounts, including some I consider close friends. The idea of abandoning my little IG community is gut-wrenching … but, at the same time, every day I’m being forced to face the painful truth that my community has already vanished, if not entirely then as good as. What remains is a mirage, one that grows more transparent every week.

But the yearning for community is ever the same. I believe it’s an existential one, ingrained in human nature. Part of what makes us human, in fact. So, where do we go from here?

For me, that answer can’t be another corporate-owned platform. I have learned my lesson; these platforms will dangle the promise of audience reach, but at the cost of unilaterally setting all the terms of engagement. I don’t trust that what’s happening with Instagram today won’t happen with Instagram 2.0 tomorrow. I’ve seen that movie before, and I know how it ends. I consider myself lucky in that, for all these years, I’ve kept this domain alive — one, tiny refuge in a storm of sh*t. I don’t have a huge audience here, but at least no one else dictates who can engage with my content and how. At the same time, I know that this blog is less conveniently accessible to people than, say, Instagram. To engage with my content here requires extra steps, and people are busy, and constantly bombarded with content from a myriad of other sources. So, I don’t have anyone directly throttling my reach, but my reach is small for other reasons. This is the part I’m working on making peace with.

I am starting to think very intently/intentionally about what it might look like to fully step away from social media and focus all my content-creation energy here. The complicating factor is the writer side of things — that’s to say, my online presence as an indie author, currently using social media as a primary means of marketing. In fact, social media is not actually effective as marketing these days, but it’s “better than nothing”. I need to figure out if there’s a “better than nothing” alternative that can replace social media. My pie-in-the-sky goal is to be able to start 2027 with a social media hiatus.

This is not necessarily a call to action — though if you have suggestions or commiserations, please share in the comments — but I am going to take the opportunity and ask you to bookmark the blog so that it has a better chance of not getting lost in the noise of *gestures around* everything going on. And to make an extra little plug: if you appreciate authentic, 100% human content, please engage with it when you have a spare moment: comment on and share posts that resonate with friends, and help make spaces where community can flourish again.

Edit: I have decided to start a free weekly email newsletter, where I can share fun highlights from my life. It will be similar in format to my Friday Feels posts (which will transition off the blog) but expanded. I will continue to post longform writing here, once a week. If you are interested in signing up for my newsletter mailing list, drop a SUBSCRIBE in the comments. Thank you to all who have reached out, here and on social media, to commiserate. I appreciate you. We will get through this.