Episode 58: What if I hate social media - 2026 edition

Episode Description

In this episode of What If? For Authors, Claire revisits the question from the podcast’s inaugural episode in 2024 through the lens of 2026: “What if I hate social media?”

Nearly a year after leaving social media, Claire shares what actually changed in her business, creative life, and relationships. She explores why many authors stay on platforms they dislike and how to evaluate whether social media is genuinely serving your goals.

Rather than encouraging a dramatic exit, Claire offers a thoughtful framework for deciding whether it's time to stay, leave, or build something better.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn

  • How to evaluate whether or not a social media platform is actually helping your author career

  • Why enjoying a platform matters more than just maintaining a presence

  • Why automating endless content isn't necessarily selling books

  • The importance of building community and social connection outside of the internet

  • How leaving social media can create more space for creativity, friendship, and attention

Resources Mentioned

Support the Show

If this episode gave you something to reflect on, here are a few ways to support the podcast:

  • Leave a review on your favorite platform - it helps other authors find the show.

  • Share this episode with an author who’s navigating similar challenges.

  • Subscribe to Claire’s Substack for deeper insights on writing, the industry, and the author life.

Happy writing!

TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of "What If for Authors?" I'm glad you're here. My name's Claire Taylor, and I'm an Enneagram certified coach for authors, as well as a humor and mystery writer. Go look around at all the services I offer at liberatedwriter.com if you're curious about how you can build a more sustainable author career in uncertain times.

I have books, courses, individual coaching, all kinds of free and paid resources for you to dig into. So the second episode I ever recorded of the "What If for Authors?" podcast, which was released in June of 2024, that episode asked the question, "What if I hate social media?" I had some thoughts for authors who felt that way that were relevant to the summer of 2024, but the landscape of social media has changed quite dramatically in the last couple years, and I think the question deserves some revisiting.

I've changed a lot with [00:01:00] regard to my personal positioning on social media, so this episode will be a bit of a mix between asking the question, what if I hate social media, which we will, and looking at what my author business has been like since I left social media almost a year ago now. Did it affect sales?

Do I miss it? Am I out of the loop? These are all questions that people have had for me since I've left. So this episode is gonna be kind of an updated one for 2026, and from my perspective on the other side of doing that thing that a lot of authors dream of doing, which is just leaving social media. So we're gonna take a look at that.

Now your relationship with social media is going to be different from mine, but I do think hearing stories from others help, and so I can provide you with my story. , hearing these stories, it can help us notice our internal reactions as we listen, and then we put ourself in the other person's position, right?

[00:02:00] So when I imagine myself doing what she did, do I feel relief? Do I feel fear? Both? What is that about? Could this work for me, or do I have a specific use case that makes it impossible for me to do that? And do I actually have a specific use case that makes it impossible, or is this my fear making up reasons why I don't have to take new and scary action?

Now, the core concepts that I mentioned in the 2024 episode, I still stand by those when we're considering what to do about social media and our author life or author career. So the first one I want to talk about is, do you enjoy the platform? Do you enjoy that social media platform? , presumably you don't because the title to this episode is "What If I Hate Social Media?"

But more specifically, do you enjoy engaging with others through that platform by commenting and posting? ' Cause here's the thing, scrolling a platform like Instagram and [00:03:00] TikTok might trick your brain into feeling productive. Hey, I'm doing market research, right? But it's not moving the needle if you're not being an active contributor to that platform outside of, you know, contributing your precious attention So let's start with this question: do you like creating content for that platform?

That's the first important question for vetting what to do. If you don't like creating content for the platform, you may consider ditching it entirely, and here's why. Only raw enthusiasm and determination, the kind that really can't be faked, or not for a long time, those are the only things that are enough to stand a chance of breaking through the attentional competition of most major social media platforms.

If you don't feel that enthusiasm, if you don't feel that drive, you're unlikely to be successful enough to justify the attentional cost of being on [00:04:00] there

Now, let's say you like creating content for a specific platform. So here would be my next question in the year of 2026. Do you want to post that content on the social media platform, or do you wanna post that content somewhere that you own? This has been a big shift in the last couple of years as people wake up to the fact that posting content to social media is more a situation of being free labor to big tech than it is a matter of building your author platform that you can sell books through So maybe being on social media catches you some readers.

Maybe. But what it definitely does is contribute to the infinite scroll abilities of these platforms that make them their money on extracting as much attention from humans as possible. So you may or may not sell books from posting content, but the social media sites make money either way. They [00:05:00] don't care.

So some discretion goes a long way with our content. Really asking what is the purpose of this piece of content, which it can be so easy to lose sight of when we feel like we have to constantly produce content, constantly compete, constantly remind people that we exist, right? So here are some questions.

Are you creating something to capture the attention of a cold audience? Is that what that content's for? Are you creating something that enhances the experience of your existing readers? Are you creating something intended to move your followers on social media who are paying you nothing, move them into some land you own, like your email list or a website, and hopefully eventually becoming paying customers?

What is the purpose of the content you're creating, and where would it be the most effective to post online? So maybe you need a platform or a part of your platform that has a [00:06:00] paywall. Maybe you need to put that content behind a paywall. Maybe you send that to your free email list subscribers instead of blasting it out to everybody and nobody on social media, right?

Maybe that content would go farther reminding the people who already read your books that you exist than to just blast it out to everyone and hope that the algorithm gods are smiling upon you. So personally, and you probably think this too if you're listening to this episode, but personally, I believe the enshittification of all the major social media platforms is complete.

, and if you don't know about enshittification in the year 2026, , this is a concept created by Cory Doctorow, , or at least, you know, sort of brought together and articulated by Cory Doctorow about the life cycle of, , for-profit websites essentially. , he has a book on it. He has multiple books on it.

So if you Google the word enshittification, which is spelled the way you think, , or [00:07:00] don't Google it, use another search engine, DuckDuckGo it, I guess, , you will find a, a more complete explanation of it. But I think, I think it's become pretty popular, , within the lex con, so we'll move on. So many people's strategy for avoiding dealing with the question of should I use social media if I hate it, has been to hand over the responsibility of creating content to other entities, maybe automations.

So for instance, you create one blog post or one video, then you create an automation that uses AI tools to slice and dice that longer content into a bunch of smaller parts that it then blasts to every possible channel a few times a day. This is something that , I saw people starting to do sort of at the beginning, end of 2024, beginning of 2025, , and it has accelerated.

So this can feel like a clever solution to [00:08:00] avoid really digging into making a choice about staying or leaving with social media, right? , and plenty of people will sell you a course or coaching on how to set up these kinds of automations. But is it effective for selling books? That is the question we need to come back to.

And it doesn't have to be that direct. It can be, is this effective for deepening connections with readers, which creates sustainability. , But let's just focus on does this sell books, these automations? Now, I've personally never seen or been presented with convincing metrics that this automation process of, you know, slicing and dicing long form content into a bunch of smaller things, and that includes, you know, having, , a program pull quotes from your manuscript and create graphics.

Those pulled quotes are almost never, , interesting or [00:09:00] impactful if you're having something like AI pull them because it, it doesn't feel, right? So it can't really understand, "Ooh, that's a good one. That hit something." You just get these random quotes. Anyway, I've, I've personally never seen anything convincing that, , doing these automations sells books, and if I were someone selling a course or coaching on this type of thing, and I had convincing metrics, data showing that this one simple system sells your books like crazy, I would be trumpeting that from the tallest mountain, and yet I have not seen that.

So what these automation systems appear to do is create digital clutter that earns very little interaction. Probably few, if any, book sales result from it. So instead, you become one of the contributors to the enshittification of the platforms. That's [00:10:00] about it. , and, you know, people are gonna argue with me about it.

Show me the evidence. Show me the conversions to book sales. Show me the people signing up for your newsletter who then engage with it, and I'm open to changing my mind. So what I'm saying is that the solution to, "Ugh, I hate social media, ugh," it isn't outsourcing content creation to an AI system or even a virtual assistant who has very little invested in making that content interesting or engaging, right?

We usually don't pay our VAs enough to make them deeply care like we care. It would have to be a lot of money. So if that's been your solution to the problem so far, maybe it's time to reassess, right? Look at some stats, some data. Is keeping your social media account on life support actually selling books?

Or might it be nice to close that loop in your mind [00:11:00] completely? There are a lot of open loops that we keep in modern life, lots and lots of them. They fracture our attention. They make us easily distractible, makes it hard to keep track of everything. What if there was a loop we could close?

So yes, I'm biased here. , I came to the conclusion that social media works counter to what I value in life more than it supports what I value. So I left Threads, Instagram, Facebook, and all the rest once and for all back in September of 2025. I also started a Substack for The Liberated Writer at that point because I wanted to have some place to share long-form content, which I really love, and Substack was an established blogging platform at that point.

Wasn't one that I was afraid was going to come in and then collapse or anything like that. It may still, but I think it has a little bit [00:12:00] more life in it. We'll see. , so I'm not anti-tech or anti-internet or anything like that here. Like, I still have platforms I use. I still, you know, have my payment platforms.

I still run a- ads. I still do these things, right? It's just social media specifically that I have become very disillusioned about. Now, I am anti-Meta, admittedly. Meta is a corporation that I would punt into the sun if I could, and I apologize to my friend who works there for saying that, but I think he's already aware.

Prior to leaving those main social media sites, I'd actually been on social media since the Friendster and MySpace days. I spent a lot of time on social media. So there was a whole internal process that needed to unfold before I was ready to let go of that. Now, it started with getting very clear on what I believed social media was [00:13:00] doing for me today.

Not what it did for me back in college, not what it did for me during the pandemic, but what it was doing for me in the present

Our brains don't usually update this information automatically, so it takes us pausing and asking the question before we get useful, clear answers. So I started by asking what I was hoping social media would do for me, and I went platform by platform. So I came up with things like sell books and keep me connected with my friends.

Those are kind of the obvious ones, right? But I also realized there were some secret hopes, like make me famous enough that I can stop worrying about money and make everyone wanna be my friend so I'm never lonely again. Now, I know these sound silly, and it's vulnerable to admit that we may have these secret hopes, but hey, we're all a bunch of little kids in adult bodies, so we can stop pretending.[00:14:00]

Uh, it's crucial to unearth those secret hopes, those desires driving our behavior, or else they'll just kinda sit there governing our decisions without intervention from our rational adult self. Once I had a pretty good idea of what I hoped social media would do for me in the present, I was able to hold that up to reality and let the light shine on it and add a little truth to the situation So let's just take Facebook, for instance.

Was social media, was Facebook selling my books, courses, coaching, and so forth? Now, truthfully, it was a little bit. Facebook was a place where I could post a new offering and my network of authors would, you know, turn up. It would lead to a few sales. Now, this is not nothing, y'all. It's something.

There was a little bit of efficacy, which is of course the most [00:15:00] dangerous amount of efficacy. Instagram and Threads seem to be pretty negligible sources of sales, so that was an easy answer to that question. But Facebook, I can make a little bit of money on it, and I have the data to show that definitively.

Kickstarter, for instance, showed how many of my backers came from links via Facebook, and again, it was not nothing. So if you find this to be the case, that one of these platforms is somewhat effective for one of your goals, please know this is where you need to bust out the scales more than anywhere else.

So it's easy to get pulled into this thinking of, "If I leave this platform, I'll lose out on sales or I'll lose out on whatever the thing is," and then just let that be the end of story, right? You're not getting the whole picture there, though, and it's crucial for us to get the whole picture. So in the instance of sales, [00:16:00] those sales don't come at zero cost to you.

That's the mistake. We think, "Well, it's free to post on Facebook, so I'm making money for free." There is a cost. They come at the cost of your attention and your time, which could be invested into something that is more effective for achieving this aim, or simply invested into taking a walk in nature or something else that's great for your wellbeing

I don't recommend you wait until the benefit of a social media platform hits zero before you leave it. If you're waiting until it feels like you lose nothing by leaving, you'll either never leave or you'll leave way, way, way too late

So that's why we bust out the scales, right? We gotta weigh one thing against another. What are you losing by staying? We almost never ask that, but what are you losing by staying? This is such an [00:17:00] important thing to consider. What are you losing? What is the expense of staying? Don't let the free to post thing fool you. What is the expense of staying? Does it outweigh the benefits of staying it's so easy to want to avoid losses that we stay in situations long after the negatives outweigh the positives We see a few positives left and we just clutch onto them. All our attention becomes focused on holding onto those few and dwindling positives, and we don't notice how the negatives are weighing us down and just draining us dry It's okay to leave before there's nothing left to lose.

And that doesn't just go for social media, by the way. So ask yourself, "What am I losing by staying? What is the cost of staying?" This is a question we don't naturally ask, so we have to pause and ask it Only [00:18:00] after holding up my secret hopes and exposing them to light of truth was I able to deconstruct them enough to convince myself that social media was not doing the thing I'd hoped it would do for me, not even the secret things I had hoped it would do for me.

Not now, and when it comes to the secret things, probably never. Probably was never doing those things, and it probably would never do those things. In fact, it was degrading the quality of my relationships, not strengthening them. It was making me a bad friend, y'all. Social media and my use of it was making me a bad friend.

Now, I realized that to a certain extent at the time, but poof, since leaving social media and seeing how much more attention I have to be a good friend to the people I care about, and unfortunately, how little some of them are able to reciprocate because their required attention is being sucked up by social media, [00:19:00] I really understand it now.

It's hard to feel connected to people who are always on their phones, who get the majority of their sensory information from screens. I've actually started selecting who gets my attention based on who either isn't on social media or spends almost no time on it. That's the friends, the friendships that I am watering.

, they just tend to be better friends, truly. They tend to reciprocate in the ways that I need. And because I value being an attentive friend to others, the person, you know, who shows up, that's really important to me, to be the person who shows up. Being on social media myself, , it's just too high a cost to who I want to be.

That's ultimately where that ended up

So once I was able to deconstruct all my hopes for social media, I found that my use of the platforms by and large [00:20:00] wasn't meeting the expectations, like not even close. That made it easy to move on to the next phase of leaving, planning my exit. If you hate social media and want to leave, I really want to persuade you to avoid quitting cold turkey, right?

Now, listen, I love a rage quit myself, but this is just not the time and place for it. If you want to sell books, you need to do some kind of platform building, so think about where you want to build your platform Now, I'll never stop suggesting an email list as the number one thing that authors can benefit from building.

, the only reason I'm putting energy into building on Substack is because it gives me access to all my subscribers. So yes, I know that I am doing free labor for Substack, but I'm also getting an audience that I own for it. I don't [00:21:00] expect to be on Substack a year from now, y'all. I, I think this is the first time I've said that, but I don't think I will be on it a year from now.

The decisions that the people in charge of that platform are making, , which have been iffy, , but let's be real, if I was gonna bail on every platform where men were making terrible decisions, I would have nowhere to go. Not the most idealist, , approach to things, I'm, I'm sure. But I've decided that right now, weighing the things, Substack works for me, but these decisions are leading straight to enshittification on Substack at pretty breakneck speeds.

But that's okay. I have decided that's fine with me because I can take my subscribers that I've found there and I can leave, and then I can email them directly. So, that was the biggest consideration for me in deciding where to let people find me once I left the traditional social media. And yes, some folks argue that [00:22:00] Substack is becoming social media with their notes feature.

I agree that notes are more social media than not, yes. But because I've deconstructed my understanding of social media and what it does for me or what I think it does for me, I just don't find myself sucked into the notes feature that much. I'm also able to use Substack's discoverability on my articles, and I use the note feature as sort of like a bulletin board for my existing subscribers to point them back to my blog posts.

Those blog posts encourage people to become paid subscribers, and then they point people toward my paid, , products So, Substack does make me money, right? I do know that. I can see that on my dashboard and in the clicked links. It matches that hope for now, and I haven't attached a hope to it that it will keep me connected to my friends or anything like that.

So those other hopes I had for social media, I have not attached them to [00:23:00] Substack, and so I can have a, a healthier and more honest relationship with it. And it just, it doesn't, , fill the need that, you know, in a, in a sort of hollow way that social media was. So yeah. It also builds my list, my email list, which eventually leads to purchases, or at least word of mouth that leads to purchases.

And I have data to back that up too, and that's also really important when we make these decisions for our business. So I launched my Substack before leaving social media because my existing active audience, which you may have, , they needed a place to go, right? Where do you find Claire? I'm not trying to become a hermit.

I'm not going to live off the grid. I'm just leaving social media. So here's where you can find me. Here's where you can listen to what I have to say. Here's where you can connect. , if you're a paid subscriber, especially on my comedy Substack, you have to be a paid subscriber to comment, but you can comment and I'll comment [00:24:00] back.

, and I have more control over that, which is a nice thing for my attention. , you have to pay me if you're gonna be mean to me online now, so that's great. So it's important to consider where you're gonna send people. Where can they find you and your books, if not on social media? And start setting that up early.

I've also been better about updating my websites. Oof, I know it's kind of painful. I'm sure there are people listening who are going, "Ooh, I don't even wanna look at my website. It's so out of date." Yeah, mine, mine were there too, don't worry. , but this is where I want people to end up, my websites, so they matter more now to my business platform.

But hey, I have the attention to give to them, so it doesn't feel like an added burden. Actually, it's been kind of fun going back and playing around with websites. , maybe there's like a certain nostalgia to it, but it's, it, it feels fun, at least for me., So figure out what your platform will look like after social media.

Do that before you leave, and then start building it before you pull away [00:25:00] from any existing platforms. Make sure that this new place, whatever it is, wherever you pick, is somewhere that you wanna spend your time and somewhere that's effective for your aims. So you wanna get some clarity on that before you make the leap So this could be a blogging platform, it could be your website, YouTube.

Many people consider YouTube social media, but it's not a platform you have to engage with in that way, so that does seem important. , maybe Patreon, Kickstarter, Backerkit, some other place where people congregate, some collective space, or even an in-person community. Your platform will likely be a constellation of these types of places, and you get to pick which ones you use and how you want them to work together.

so I've been digging into DFOS lately, which is the Dark Forest OS. It's a private internet that's trying to address the [00:26:00] factors of enshittification and avoid those. And that's looking promising, though I'm not exactly sure how I wanna use it yet. But it's thought-provoking, and it's refreshing to sort of have that question of, "Ooh, what can I do here?"

It's sort of a blank canvas, and it reminds me that I can make my platform whatever I want it to be. For me, that doesn't include social media. So there's a pretty straightforward element of strategy involved in leaving social media, and it's totally doable, and most of you can figure it out without too much trouble if you've been on the internet for a while.

There's sort of a technical aspect to it, a sort of knowledge of what's out there. And that's usually not why people stay on social media, because they can't figure out a better strategy genuinely. There is a strong chance that if you hate social media but you're still on it, [00:27:00] you're lying to yourself about why you stay on it.

Sorry to do this to you, but it's probably the case. So social media is a big fucking lie that's been sold to us, and for a long time we thought we had to buy in, right? It told us we could be social without being present Before you, your heart, your mind, your body feels safe leaving social media, you need to be present in real life with real friends who make you feel seen. And you n- need to observe the difference between that and whatever the hell shitty ass version you're getting from social media, right? Then you need to start building your in-person social circles, or at least your off-platform social circles, right?

This could be maybe Discord [00:28:00] groups that are active. , it could be, you know, any sort of community, but just focus on in-person for a while if you can. So if your in-person social circles aren't robust and functioning independently from social media, it will not feel safe to the most essential part of your social creature body to leave social media behind

So this is where authors come up with a lot of excuses. But you gotta go make more friends, right? Make friends with people who don't care about the fact that you write books. That's very important. Go get involved with your community. Volunteer in person. Attend a meetup that it would be so easy to skip, but don't skip it.

Show up. Practice being a better friend to your friends. Ask yourself what that would mean. Build up the muscles required [00:29:00] to talk to strangers and to get to know new people, to sit with your existing friends without checking your phone. So for most people, and this includes me, you know, when I was very involved in social media, but for most people, these muscles have atrophied if you haven't been using them.

But they can be built back just like any muscles, right? And until you start to build those, you're going to struggle to leave social media

So here's just a little before and after for you to help paint the picture. In my late 20s, early 30s, I had terrible social anxiety. I mean, it was painful some days for me to think about interacting with anyone So John would occasionally have to cover for me when I would miss events with friends because I was just like, "I can't do it.

I can't do it." It would bring me to tears sometimes. I [00:30:00] didn't like that feeling of limitation. , and if you've felt that, I understand that feeling, and I understand that you probably also don't like that feeling of limitation. So with some therapy to understand the anxiety and a whole lot of practice, I just started rebuilding my social muscles, and it was awkward and it was painful.

And it didn't always, , go in a way that was very flattering to my ego, but I just didn't wanna go back to that point where I, I felt like I couldn't talk to people. So, you know, you might need therapy for this part of the process, the right kind of therapy, the right therapist. , and there are a lot of good books you can read too.

I did a lot of reading at this point in my life, , including Enneagram related books. The Enneagram helped me understand how the patterns of my type specifically were making socializing extremely painful, and not just the act of [00:31:00] socializing, but the time afterwards when I was going back and rehashing all of the interactions.

That was also painful. But I was able to try out some new approaches that eventually helped. So over time and with practice, as most things go, I started to realize that I was maybe okay at talking to people, friends and strangers, you know, the barista, the person sitting next to me at a table, right? At least I, I felt pretty certain that they weren't leaving the interaction going, "What the hell was that?" Or hoping to never speak to me again. I mean, there were a , a couple interactions where I think that was probably the result, but, more wins than losses. So flash forward, and I was actually at a funeral this weekend with some of my friends from my pottery class.

So our classmate Della passed away, and there were sort of a loose connection of people. The Thursday night class does have a, a strong sense [00:32:00] of identity and belonging. A lot of people have been there for years and years. So anyway, a few of us attended the funeral. I never would have been able to even get myself to the funeral before I started working on my social anxiety.

I would've come up with a, a bunch of justifications for skipping just to protect myself from the awkwardness of attending an event where I might not know anyone else at a church that I for sure do not share beliefs with, where I might, God forbid, become publicly overwhelmed by emotion. Yikes. That was just not even an option on the table before

But my rule for myself now is that I just go to the funeral. Just go to the funeral. I go to funerals. I'm a person who goes to funerals. Not random funerals, that, that's weird. But funerals of people I know, right? Or people whose loved ones I know. So there [00:33:00] are always justifications for missing a funeral.

I could come up with all kinds of ones, all kinds of excuses, but none of them ever hold up to scrutiny over time for me. , I always regret it. Anyway, I get to this funeral and I spot a couple of my classmates. I've been in this pottery class with them for about four years, and we share a lot of our life with one another, especially at the end of session potlucks where there's wine.

But I don't ever see them outside of the context of pottery class. So it was a novel experience in seeing them. It was like a new part of our, you know, relationship. I was curious what it would be like to suddenly be thrown into this really intimate situation of a funeral. And it was fine, actually. But when I approached the pew where they were sitting, this stranger was sitting next to them, and she got up to let me sit next to my friends.

And I was like, "Oh, no, it's fine. You don't need to do that. No big deal." But she insisted, so, you know, I traded spots with her. And then one of [00:34:00] my friends who had been chatting with this stranger before I arrived, she goes, "Oh, you'll love Claire. She can talk to anyone."

When I tell y'all my ass was stunned silent. , thankfully, the service began almost immediately, and I was left sitting there going, "Is that the impression I give off, that I can talk to anyone?" It was just like, it was one of those moments where you, you really get to place yourself on a map. Like, I was over on that side of the continent, but now I guess I'm on the other coast and I don't even know when I got here.

Anyway, it was one of those moments where I realized I got to actually experience, oh yeah, I have developed this muscle. Yeah, that felt pretty cool. And now I know I'm slipping a little into the, "if I can do it, so can you" realm, , which I don't love. So let's pull back a little bit. Your path to building social confidence and [00:35:00] in-person social structures, it'll look different from mine, of course.

You may never get to the point where someone describes you as being able to talk to anyone, or you may zoom right past that and beyond. If you're not an Enneagram 1, you probably have different blocks to address before you feel more empowered to make in-person social networks. Even if you are an Enneagram type 1, you might have to order different items off of that reformer menu What I do know, and not just from my experience, but from the experience of many others I've spoken with, is that you do have to build these muscles, and they can atrophy when we don't build them.

Social media doesn't tone the muscle of social connection. It tones the muscle of social performance. Social performance is exhausting. Social connection is often restorative. So yes, building an author platform outside of social media before you [00:36:00] leave, that's important to keep things moving in your business, and it may even be the thing that changes the game for you when you put more of your attention toward platforms where you have control.

But you also have to build your social structures outside of social media before you leave. Even if you think, "I don't want to use social media for the social part," I challenge you to build those social structures anyway, those real communities for yourself. If you scroll social media, your brain is ser- searching for something.

Your heart is searching for something. Ask yourself honestly what that is and how you can fulfill it in a more meaningful way So one caveat here. I should acknowledge this or else I'm gonna have people acknowledge it for me in my inbox. Some of you live in remote areas or have really busy lives caregiving or driving your kids around.

I get that. It doesn't have to be all or nothing here. [00:37:00] So you can build and maintain a community online, say, but I do encourage you to value it enough to try to get in-person events together occasionally You'll know the difference when you experience it. You probably already know the difference, right?

We've all experienced that magical in-person connection and then just kind of chased it, , on social media, and maybe we just start to forget the difference sometimes. But we need to be physically in each other's presence. The more we do that, the less appeal social media holds for us, and the easier it will be to finally take that first step off of it, if that's what you choose to do.

So if you're wondering, "What if I hate social media in 2026?" I would say it's totally possible that you are overdue for leaving it. Yes, truly. Even if it's effective for this or for that, it doesn't mean you have to stay. Expand your imagination to a life [00:38:00] without it. The internet is becoming a performance and a lie at speeds never before seen, which means it's time for you, a storyteller, to go experience what is real to feed your stories with that Ask yourself honestly what you hope social media is doing for you today.

Then compare that to the reality of what it's actually doing for you today. Don't wait until it feels like you'll lose nothing before you leave, or else you may be stuck there forever Transformation always requires loss, but we do it because of what there is to gain. So what will you gain if you leave?

Then take a step back and ask what you need to build for yourself to have somewhere to land once you leave social media What platforms do you need to grow or [00:39:00] reinvigorate for your author career? Do you need more friends? Is it as simple as that? Do you need deeper friendships? What social life do you need to water so that you can spend a day without even thinking about social media?

And then it's time to go build those things. Don't wait until you have a clear path to get started. Start something. Figure it out as you go. Even if you wait until you think you have it all figured out before you start, you'll be wrong and have to figure out more as you go, so you might as well get started now.

Put what you need to do to get started on your calendar, and don't let yourself justify on the day of why you don't actually need to do it. The first day to any new process, any new experience, the first day is the hardest, so shut off your brain. I'm not gonna tell you this often, but I'm gonna tell you right now, okay?

Shut off your brain, stop listening to all your big feelings, and take that first step. No [00:40:00] excuses, no reasoning your way out of it, no saying you're not in the mood. Go to the meetup, go to the open mic, go to the highway cleanup, whatever it is. Maybe it's not something you ever wanna attend again, but you still will have more useful information if you go than if you spent those couple hours doom scrolling.

So set aside an afternoon to, I don't know, learn about Kickstarter or update your website. Browse in-person events for selling your books or, you know, attend a writing group near you. You don't have to know how it'll pay off. In-person connections are always more promising and mysterious in that way Maybe no one at the event itself proves to be your new bestie, but maybe they introduce you to someone who will be.

So staying open to possibility, it goes such a long way at in-person events. And I don't think I'm telling you anything new here. I [00:41:00] think we know this, but it's easy to forget when there's this sort of replacement of social media available that, that asks less of us, that risks less vulnerability. It's easy to just default to that.

But success is largely about who we know, and getting to know people, that happens almost exclusively in person now. So get out there. You can leave social media, and most of the authors I talk to who voice a desire to probably should. The excuses for not doing it are almost always just fear speaking.

Only a handful of times have these authors had numbers to show me that back up the financial incentive for staying, and even then, it's usually just on one platform where that's true. So it's time to challenge your excuses and ask yourself, "What are you really scared of here?" It's been almost a year [00:42:00] since I left social media, and I haven't felt the desire to return, which I was surprised by, frankly.

But I'm enjoying the experience of living too much. I don't miss that buzzing in my brain after a long scroll session, and when I wonder what a friend's up to, I send them a text rather than stalking them. And in doing so, I get the benefit of their presence rather than getting to see their performance on social media

If a healthy and real connection is like biting into a perfectly ripened peach, social media is sipping a peach LaCroix. Like, yeah, I guess that's peach I'm sensing there, but it's like the ghost of peach's past. It's not super satisfying. So I have a long and detailed post on my Liberated Writer Substack about my experience with leaving social media.

It goes way more in depth on that process than I have in this [00:43:00] episode. If you wanna explore this possibility and deconstruct some of those fears keeping you from making moves, check that out. That's liberatedwriter.substack.com, and do me a favor and subscribe to me while you're over there if you haven't already. That's it for this episode of "What If for Authors?" I'm glad you joined me. I hope we can do this again, maybe meet in person someday soon. Apparently, I can talk to anybody, , and my microphone agrees. It is ready for me to stop talking. If you'd like some guidance on where you might be struggling to transition away from social media, I can totally help you with that.

Go book an author alignment session with me at liberatedwriter.com, and we can look at how your core fear might be manifesting and whispering dirty lies into your ear. I'm happy to help you drill down into each of your platforms to ask the questions that [00:44:00] matter in deciding if it's time to leave or if it would be better for you to stay, and where you might be better served putting your attention instead if it's time for you to leave.

So you can find that booking information at liberatedwriter.com. Get a little individualized help. Why not? That's what I needed to get started, so let's do it. I'm Claire Taylor, and I hope you'll join me for the next episode of the "What If for Authors?" podcast. Happy writing.