Social Media and Human grocery shopping; how to become the best at selling your soul!

Over the past few months, I have dialed waaaay down on producing (content). Don’t get me wrong — I’ve been working like a hungry monkey in a jungle full of bananas. But this year, for so many reasons, I’ve taken some extreme decisions.

One of them was to break the monetary relationship between my art and my financial life. It’s something I’ve been trying to do for a while, but I couldn’t maintain it without taking a more foundational stance.

A second step was not to jump on social media and over-glorify every win or victory — an exhibition, a workshop, a media feature, etc. The fact that I don’t do this as often is, of course, somehow limiting my visibility (which was probably over-glorified anyway). This allowed me to focus more on what I actually want to do and experiment, without rushing into it.

Another step I took this year was not to get attached to tools and methods. While I’m still, at this point, trying to test every tool I can get my hands on, I don’t really care anymore if there’s a new tool or technique — unless I find it helps me with a specific objective.

If you’ve read my last piece about AI content being the contemporary equivalent of TV news, you’ll know what I mean.

I can’t deny that I miss the rush every morning when I open my email to find ten different people from around the world reaching out for different reasons — or those goddamn red notifications on Instagram showing that my feed has broken the numbers of follows, likes, and comments.

But the more I look back at my earliest posts and stories, the way I posted (which I now see in almost every post by someone else), I feel like I’ve been treating myself as a product. I’ve been running ads to sell myself, to convince you that I’m doing it — that you should follow me. I think this started to dissipate gradually until it’s probably vanishing.

I now find places like Instagram, Twitter, and especially LinkedIn are transforming (for me) into places of human shopping. You are your own product and dealer, and you always want to give or express a value beyond your real worth. Most content creators, especially with AI, will say, do, or avoid anything just to display an ambiguous statistic about how they’re the chosen ones on this digital cloud.

We live in times where the liberation of these ideas might actually harm more than it benefits. But looking at this from a timeless angle — you see the rise and fall of trends and people. And you look for an objective.

For me, it has always been honesty. Probably my blessing and my curse is that I can’t hide from myself. And that I can’t hide my feelings. I know how naïve that sounds, but the more I deal with a not-so-naïve world, the more I hold onto it.

I think if there’s any hope left in the world, it’s in our ability to face ourselves in a true, deep, and meaningful way. In understanding that we might be shackled by what seems to liberate us. In understanding our complex connections that exceed our own desires — the same desires that make us turn ourselves into our own products.

Here’s the problem: everyone alive now is a product of consumerism-driven behavior, based on mass production and consumption — where value lies in mass distribution over quality. It inevitably reflects on how we see ourselves and how we want to be seen.

It makes us give away our true individuality in favor of conformity. Because if you want to sell more, if you want to sell fast, you better meet the demand.

Maybe I’m just saying — while I still long for attention, I’m not interested in the demand anymore.