You know the feeling: mindlessly scrolling social media when it’s getting too close to bedtime, or maybe well past bedtime. Scrolling even when you have important work to do the next day and knowing that blue screens are bad for sleep and health. That’s been me, far too often in recent weeks.
The rub? My business relies on social—specifically, organic social. And yet the very platforms we use professionally keep hijacking my attention, sometimes for hours.
The habit is worst when I have vast swaths of free time, like on a weekend. I love books, but if my phone is within arm’s length when I sit down to read, my hand, on its own volition, will reach out, pick up the phone, and check my social accounts whether “I” want to or not!
Reflecting on this kind of mindless behavior, Georgetown University computer scientist Cal Newport argues for digital minimalism: clearing away low-value digital noise and using social media minimally or even doing away with it altogether.
Over the last 6 years, I’ve whipsawed back and forth in my relationship with social media:
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I deleted Facebook and Twitter (X) in 2019, then reinstalled X last year.
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In 2021, I removed Signal after getting sucked into political debates with friends.
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I refused WhatsApp invites and asked my wife to pass along anything truly important, before relenting and signing up for my own account.
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I’ve uninstalled, then reinstalled YouTube, Instagram, TikTok (as well as email, Slack, and Asana) on my iPhone multiple times over the years, each time hoping to reclaim control of my time and attention only to realize the impracticalities of restricting mobile access.
My cognitive dissonance with social media comes knowing that my business benefits when people mindlessly scroll and tap. It’s how we help our clients find customers, and how we find our own clients.
Complete abstinence from social media may allow me to think with clarity, but it also makes it impossible for me to truly understand the most-powerful marketing tool in history: using sophisticated algorithms to reach an exact, target audience, organically, with no direct cost.
As much as I admire Cal Newport and his approach to the good life and creativity through deep work, I realized that, paradoxically, complete abstinence from social media is also a vice.
None other than Aristotle points out that vice comes not just from over-indulgence, but also from unthinking adherence to any “first principle,” including strict abstinence.
In the introduction to his translation of Nicomachean Ethics, Joe Sachs tells us that Aristotle suggests a sort of “just right” goldilocks approach to life, what later thinkers described as Aristotle’s “Golden Mean.”
The idea is that we become our best selves by inhabiting a tension between the extremes of overindulgence and strict abstinence. By holding an awareness of the self engaging with the world, we maintain our capacity for understanding and therefore choice.
Sachs tells us that this sort of “having-and-holding” is what the Greeks called hexis, and it depends on our ability to truly concentrate and pay attention. I call it presence: an ability and a commitment to “be here now,” fully self-aware of this moment in time and with all of our faculties available to us.
Sachs offers the example of looking forward to a piece of cake you’ve been saving all day for a mid-evening snack, when a friend unexpectedly arrives to visit.
“If you are a glutton,” Sachs says, “you might hide the cake until the friend leaves, or gobble it down before you open the door. If you have the opposite vice, and have puritanically suppressed in yourself all indulgence in the pleasures of food, you won’t have cake or any other treat to offer your visitor.”
The most happiness is experienced when you share your cake with your friend. In other words, at both extremes—complete gluttony or strict abstinence—your experience of life is diminished.
When you are free from the tyranny of your own gluttonous desires and the tyranny of self-imposed abstinence, you open up a kind of clearing in which you are able to truly think and choose for yourself how you participate in life.
It’s our task as professionals to step into the tension between these extremes, recognizing that our target audience is subsumed by the same memes and staged personas that trap us from time to time.
Make no bones about it: as marketers, we’re leveraging that very mindlessness to make money.
Television advertising executives discovered long ago how mere exposure to a brand can boost buying when a mass audience engages in passive, unthinking entertainment. And now we’re deploying AI-powered algorithms like TikTok that are designed to trap audiences for hours of mindless scrolling, keeping them on a platform long enough to expand our reach and impact with precisely targeted messaging.
We’ve all lost hours of our own lives to social media that we’ll never recover. As marketers, we leverage that same mindlessness for sales. So the question isn’t whether we’ll use it, it’s towards what end?
“Virtue makes the end right, but practical wisdom makes the things toward the end right.” —Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics