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. Organic-first marketing is the lever that moves our entire business. And yet the very platforms we use professionally keep hijacking my attention, sometimes for hours.
This 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, it 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.
I’ve whipsawed on this strategy over the last 6 or 7 years:
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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.
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I’ve installed and uninstalled YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok multiple times on my iPhone.
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 makes it impossible for me to take advantage of the most-powerful marketing tool in history: using sophisticated algorithms to reach an exact, target audience, organically, with no direct cost.
Over the weekend, I realized that what I saw as virtuous—abstaining from social media—isn’t virtuous at all. I realized that, paradoxically, complete abstinence is also a vice.
This all came to me while reading Joe Sachs’s translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. In his introduction, Sachs suggests we approach our best selves not through strict abstinence nor indulgence, but by inhabiting a tension between those extremes.
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 experience joy.
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.
The trap of mindlessness is nothing new: our modern technologies just happen to reveal what’s always been part of the human condition. Aristotle himself alludes to it in the Ethics with a reference to Plato’s Meno (1095b, 1096a), in which a young Aristocrat can only regurgitate the ready-made sayings of his culture, abdicating any capacity to truly think.
Make no bones about it: as marketers, we’re leveraging that very mindlessness to make money. And now we’re deploying AI-powered algorithms to expand our reach and impact.
Will we use our superpowers for good, or for ill? I suppose it comes down to what’s in our hearts.
“Virtue makes the end right, but practical wisdom makes the things toward the end right.” —Nicomachean Ethics VI.12, 1144a7–9