Dispatch #42: The Music I'm Not Making

Leaving social media in 2025

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This year, my resolution will begin in February when I turn 44. The day before my birthday, I will ask someone close to me to change my Instagram and Facebook passwords (sorry, Patrick, that’s you), and then I will sign out of both accounts. Even if I want to log on, I won’t be able to. I’m not sure when I will return to these accounts: maybe when I turn 45. Maybe never.

I’ve decided it’s the perfect time to retreat. Trump will be in office, for one, and I don’t want to see his gaudy face all the time. The war-to-vacation photos whiplash is already challenging, and I can’t abide the notion that posting about an atrocity is a political action—or that, by not posting you are complicit in this or that atrocity. It’s not that I disagree with a story or meme, it’s that I’ve already seen it fourteen times in ten hours and it’s stale.

(Also? I loathe cats. I need a break from the cats.)

Importantly, I’ll have no new novel to shill in 2025. All I have is an unfinished one. From a career perspective, there is no “need” for me to be online this year. Was there ever, though? I doubt that being online has ever helped my novel sales. For me, social media is a time waster and a stress relief; my accounts are more public photo album than they are a professional tool. Honestly, social media is such a distraction that I’m pretty sure it impedes my career.

It’s time for me to turn off the phone and turn on the headlamp: I’m about to crawl deep into the writing cave.

I’ve taken social media breaks here and there since the Friendster days. I’m never online when I go on a writing retreat, for instance. And, in 2019, I made this same year-long resolution. I kept to it and it felt great. Something beautiful or funny would occur, and I wouldn’t broadcast it. Why should I? The moment was mine. Only a few days into my detox, the mental chyron of possible Instagram captions dissolved from my consciousness. Sometimes (but not usually), I would forget my phone existed at all. I was free.

In that year of privacy, I finished a draft of Time’s Mouth. When it failed to sell on its first submission round, I weathered the rejections in private, happy not to sift through the accomplishments of other writers while my agent forwarded me yet another “I’ll step aside” email from an editor. I felt protected from my worst impulses.

Eight months into that radio silence, I had a third baby. Although I did get to reveal Mickey’s presence on the Instagram account of my now defunct podcast, he was, by the internet’s standards, a secret. I loved this. In Mickey’s first few months, the boundaries between life and death, sleep and waking, my body and my child’s, were porous, whereas the separation between my life and the business of the everyday world was more startling than ever. Why would I let just anyone inside with my little machine? To deny access: that’s power. What is private is sacred.

But then, four days after a year offline, I took an incredibly cute photo of Mickey. He was about five months old: big blue eyes, long black eyelashes, cheeks filling out, footie pajamas. The urge to share him with the world was pure. I wanted to show him off. So, without too much thought, I did just that.

(Let me just say, a new baby is the perfect ta-da when returning to social media.)

With a single post, my silence ended. I was welcomed back to the chatter, and from then on I participated in hundreds of public and private conversations, some with people I’ve known for years, and some with people I’ve never met. When lockdown began a few months later, I was grateful to be among friends.

Now, five years later, like nearly everyone else, I’m hooked as badly as ever. Like nearly everyone else, I’m sick of it. I don’t want to follow strangers online; I don’t like short, loud videos. (I’m a geezer who finds TikTok boring and/or grating.)

At first, I loved watching dance on Instagram, and then, as with anything the algorithm serves, the sameness of the content began to bother me, file my spirit down into a smooth, complacent nub. Wait—was all dance identical?

With the dance content came the diet content. Now the algorithm is feeding my swamp monster id. She wants before-and-after photos, women not simply whittling their bodies down but becoming hard with muscle too. It doesn’t matter if I usually find the “before” image more appealing than the “after”; the id wants transformations, wants to be poisoned. Everyone is thin and taut and young, and every thin and taut and young dancer is doing the same torso contortion, the same toe flick. Everyone else is telling me about their expensive vacation or reminding me of dying children across the world or reposting the same meme. I’m bored and jealous and guilty and despairing. I want off this bus.

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Patrick and I joke that if aliens were to land on planet Earth, it would take about fifteen minutes for humanity to consume and accept this new reality. Minute sixteen, someone would post an image of the alien on, like, the couch from Roseanne, with the caption It me.

How swiftly digital culture moves beyond wonder.

And how easily we pick up the rhetoric and language of others. In 2023 every person with a podcast abused the phrase “one hundred percent” and I wanted to strangle my car stereo. Once Patrick said it and I nearly strangled him. Not you too, I said.

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Mickey got Mario Bros walkie talkies for Christmas. Ginger was using the Luigi one. She said, “I’ll be Luigi Mangione” in that deadpan way of hers and I laughed so hard. She isn’t even online, does not even watch YouTube or use an iPad, and yet the tone of the internet has soaked her discourse.

Sometimes, she pretends to film herself, using a Chuck E. Cheese game card as her pretend phone. She starts her fake video with, “Hey guys.” She urges you to like and subscribe.

Everyone just wants to be liked and subscribed to.

But not always, right? There’s the opposite feeling too.

You get it taking a walk without anything in your ears. When you’re reading a book someone wrote forty years ago, a hundred. When you’re on the beach in December with your family and no one else but the five of you knows where you are. The ocean water is cold, the sky overcast, the kids screeching, complaining. Wetsuited surfers walking back to their cars barefoot.

Later, you post about it online, and the variegated magic and annoyances of the afternoon get whittled into that same complacent nub.

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In Hua Hsu’s review of Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly, he ends by mentioning an interview Pelly did with a musician named Daniel Lopatin. Some artists, Lopatin says, basically crowdsource their music by beta testing refrains and melodies, trying to make songs that will please the content machine and go viral.

Lopatin asks, “If your art practice is so ingrained in the brutal reality that Spotify has outlined for all of us, then what is the music that you’re not making? What does the music you’re not making sound like?”

Writing can’t be crowdsourced in the same way music can be, but our minds can be trained to want endless distractions, frictionless experiences, to seek out the cliché even as it’s dull, to repeat the same sentence structures. We can, perhaps unknowingly, write with this mindset—or for it.

I have hope that ducking out of the internet for an extended period of time will help me listen to my own voice, my own style, my own desires. What do I care about? What books will I reach for when I don’t know which ones everyone is talking about? What stories will I want to tell?

I need to find the music I haven’t been making.

Of course, there’s a fine line between being original and being irrelevant. That’s the fear, isn’t it? That no one will read what I bring, squinting, out of the cave. That, if I go offline, I will have, essentially, disappeared.

Can I write contemporary novels if I bow out of contemporary life, much of which happens online?

I don’t yet know the answers to these questions.

But maybe disappearing for the many, to remain present for the few—and for myself—wouldn’t be the worst fate.

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On New Year’s Eve, my daughter watched the ball drop in New York City from my in-laws’ living room in Tucson, Arizona. It was on cable television. She was totally compelled by the spectacle.

I thought to take a photo of her sincerity and post it online.

I didn’t.

photogenic family