Addiction, serious addiction.
Social media is addictive, very, very addictive. Like any addiction, anyone can be hoodwink into it and not able to control themselves. It's a powerful as any substance, you get up, you check your status. You check it a couple of time before you leave home. You spend your entire commute to work, checking up on others and posting. Throughout the day you're chatting to people and checking more posts. The commute home, same again. Then throughout the evening you check in an out. I don't smoke, drink, never so much as done a puff of a "Moroccan Woodbine" in my life but social networking got me.
As a semi-pro photographer you get sucked into a world of constantly thinking you have to out-do people with better and better pictures, so all you do is constantly check on your progress, your likes and everything you do is shot to try to out-do others. After about a year of it and realising what it was doing to me, I quit all social media full stop and stopped taking photos in order to "detox". Then I started taking pictures and I made myself some rules if I was going back to social media and I stick to them, very strict rules about how much I'm allowed to use it. 6 months later and I'm much better. I don't want to quit completely, I have some very good photographer friends on there, we sometimes meet up and it's good but like anything you need to control it and use it as a tool.
I'm a strong person, I've never been tempted to try substance abuse but social media was my nasty vice, too easy to use and too easy to abuse. I would strongly advise anyone to think twice about using social media, if you have no real reason to be on there, keep off. If you're a creative and you wish to share and meet other creatives, fine but be very strict with yourself and use it as a tool, don't let it use you.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
