I abandoned social media, but now I feel left out and forgotten. Since I now barely have an online existence, people tend to make plans that don't include me. And when I do send somebody a message to arrange a meetup, my energy gets sapped waiting for the replies. Most of my friends communicate through social media, so my old way of communicating gets lost.

How can I still live a meaningful social life with this quandary? - So what do you think, I don't know if it's a he or she, let's say he. What do you think he means by his friends make plans mainly using social media? What tool is he talking about?

Because he separates out messaging, which he does do. - Well, you can message on Instagram. I think a lot of people do that, especially young people. - So like using Instagram instead of like iMessage or WhatsApp. - Yeah. Using the communication within those apps. I know that, like with our guys, my coach, like in high school, they use Instagram messaging a lot.

- Okay. And this, is this different than, is DM Twitter? - That's DM. - Or it's Instagram DM as well? - DMing is- - Direct messaging. - That's Instagram. - Right. Okay. So it's like a main way. It's why like a lot of people- - And I could see like, you know, parties and stuff like that being announced there, especially on Facebook.

Like they, people would invite people more our age, but I bet you people use a lot Facebook to make plans and invitations, stuff like that. - So Instagram does this. TikTok is not a social network, right? So it's not TikTok. There you're seeing stuff the algorithm shows, but Facebook, Instagram, maybe Twitter, are probably not as much anymore.

Like Instagram. Okay. So I think, my thought here is, okay, perfectly fine use for social media. I mean, if your friends are using a messaging feature of let's say Instagram to meet up, then use the messaging feature on Instagram to meet up. Just don't use Instagram in other ways.

Just put up gates about how you want to use it. Like this shouldn't be too hard. - Yeah. Same with Facebook. I mean, if he's a little bit older and a lot of invitations would be sent through Facebook, just go on there a couple of times a week and see if there's any invitations to go.

- Yeah. So go on Facebook, look at invitations. Instagram, go on there and look at your DMs. Don't post things. Don't really follow anyone except for your friends, I suppose, if they're posting something. Don't make Instagram on your phone a default place to go if you're bored. Seek out slow distractions instead of fast, like we talked about in the show.

But to use Instagram as sort of a inefficient version of WhatsApp, fine. So I'm glad you asked this question because we want to be, when we're thinking about our engagement with the digital, we want to be very intentional, right? I really try to steer away from more generic prescriptions.

This is evil, this is good. Never do this, always do that. If you read "Digital Minimalism", for example, my book, "Digital Minimalism", I don't go in and say, here's the bad services, here's the good. I don't go in and say, let me talk about how bad of a guy Mark Zuckerberg is.

You don't want to support his company. I said, figure out what you want to do. Figure out the right tools to do that. Use those tools to do that. And anything else those tools try to get you to do, say, I'm not interested. Just take control over how you use your digital life.

So there's a chapter in "Digital Minimalism". If you get that book, there's a chapter called "Join the Attention Resistance" that gets to exactly what I think you need to think about here. And it's about how do you use the advantageous parts of these giant attention economy platforms without being trapped by the other parts that you're not interested in and that are poised to perhaps capture your attention and make your life worse.

And to do that is almost like an act of resistance. To come into your Instagram, and it's not on your phone, it's on your computer, to come into Instagram, but you haven't followed anybody. So there's just like these weird discover stuff that the algorithm chose you could care less about.

And you jump in, look at the DMs and jump out. To do like I talk about in that book, to use a plugin, so you can go into Facebook to see Facebook groups where people are posting about parties, but there's no newsfeed. That's the attention resistance. You see, I'm keeping control of my attention, and you're not going to take control of my attention by luring me in with these specific really useful features.

I can use those useful features without having to become a pawn in your attention economy scheme. It's like we talked about with YouTube as well. YouTube is a great library. YouTube is a great cable channel. It's a dangerous form of wandering distraction. So people come in and use plugins, for example, that get rid of, and this is an example from that chapter, get rid of the recommendations.

It turns YouTube into like a search engine. I know I like "Deep Questions," and I know the new episodes come out Monday. So on Monday, I go and I type into the top "Deep Questions" or "Cal Newport," and I click on the latest episode and I watch it. I use it, it's like turning on the TV and watching a certain show.

But there's nothing being recommended on the side. That's it. If I want to do something else, I'll look it up. Oh, I want to know how to fix something. I search for that thing and I get the video. I watch it, I'm done. It's a great library. Another example of the attention resistance.

So if your friends are using the communication tools built into social media apps, use those tools, but only use those tools. And by doing so, you're sort of giving a metaphorical middle finger to the owners of those companies anyways, which itself is kind of fun. I learned something. - Yeah.

- Communication tools. I know journalists talk about it a lot. Journalists find this useful because people, a lot of very online people that you might need to like get a quote from for an article or whatever, that's how they contact them. Twitter DM. It's like, it's something I don't have.

I think it's been fine, but I think there's a lot of that going on in journalism. DMing people's social media accounts to try to contact them. Kind of makes me glad I don't have Twitter. I think about all the DMs we would get. I mean, we already get so many emails.

Could you imagine? If people had the illusion of like, I could just like directly yell at you about things. All right, let's do a call. Do we have a call load up? - Yes, we do. Here we go. - G'day, it's Logan here. I'm a Kiwi currently living in the US working as a financial consultant.

I have a question around decentralized social media. I've spent the last five years developing my artistic drawing skills to a proficient level until I could now generate some real revenue. I'm not about to quit my day job. My question is more about how do I share my content with an audience?

How do I monetize it? How do I do this and still maintain control over what I create while not handing over the reins of these things and my audience to a large social media company? Ideally, I would only use social media as a tool to funnel viewership into some other thing.

Well, I'd love to hear your thoughts. I've heard you talk theoretically about this idea, but don't really know how you imagine it to work in practice. Cheers for all the hard work, out. - All right, Kiwi, that's New Zealand? - I think so. - All right, excellent. International audience, I like it.

So what type of art was he saying? He said visual. - Yeah. - Visual, some sort of digital visual art. Yeah, so once again, I don't know that particular world well, but like in my answer to Fab, I believe it was, the Peruvian musician, I'll give a similar answer here, which is, okay, 12 years ago, how did the artists in this general space, how did they get noticed and spread?

Go see if you can do that. Like that's step one, right? And so it's probably, you're doing something really original, and then maybe it starts in a local gallery. Maybe it starts in someone else's sort of showcase that they do. That's a starting place. Building a digital home is another good idea.

Build a website. You can have a digital home with a website where people can come and see your art, right? And then be okay with not trying to play the algorithmic amplification lottery. Be okay with I'm working on this art, I'm finding like a slower way of developing this and spread it to an audience.

I have a digital home to point people towards. Go to this well-designed website. You can see or buy my art. You can join my mailing list for updates if you wanna know when new pieces are coming out or for sale. And build a following slowly. That is a durable following you're going to build.

It's also, I think, a beneficial feedback loop. You have to interact more with people, convince people to let you in their galleries, convince people to buy your work one by one. That feedback loop improves your work. Okay, maybe this is not really original enough, so I need to do something different here.

You don't get any of that feedback if you're just posting on Instagram and hoping that like a celebrity influencer repost one of your things and then all these people are interested in your work. So like how did people do this 12 years ago? Like do that with a good website and mailing list and be ready for that to be a slow process.

Again, and I left this out in the fab answer, but the other piece here is the slowness of the process motivates you more because you have to work harder and harder to try to move this thing along. When you're just posting stuff on Instagram, you get caught up in what I call checklist productivity, where you feel like the key to a big accomplishment is just following some script that other people don't have access to.

That in other words, the scarcity that means most people don't succeed is in the information, not in the actual execution. And so you could end up in a checklist productivity mode where what you really care about is am I posting on a regular schedule? Do I have good tags and hashtags for the algorithm to hit?

Am I spending enough time following other artists and replying so they'll follow me? You get caught up because that's so much easier. Checklist productivity, anyone can do it. That's so much easier than saying, how do I make this better? This local gallery in New Zealand, you know, they didn't wanna show this.

Why, how can I make it better so they would? Let me be around more artists. Let me meet more artists. Let me join or start an artist collective where we're helping and critiquing each other's work. The slower approach forces you to focus on quality and lights that fire to keep pushing in a way that when you're just playing the algorithmic amplification lottery, you're like, I don't know, I'm just, what really matters is some clever trick I do in my headline construction.

That's gonna please the algorithm. And all that's energy that could be going towards making your stuff better. So for our third and final segment, like take something that's going around the internet and react to it. Today I wanna react to a YouTube video that some of our listeners were sending in because it's going around the internet right now.

I'm looking at it now. It has over 1.5 million views. And so I thought we would take a look. For those who are watching instead of just listening, I have it loaded up on the screen here in the corner with the closed captioning. So the title of this YouTube video is I'm a 33 year old woman with no life.

My advice to young women. So we have a young woman talking straight to camera. Here, I'll read the closed caption at the beginning. I wanna give you some advice on how to deal with this and cope with no sense of direction. But for now, I kinda wanna just tell you my story of how I got here.

And it's not long and it's not that sad. All right, so then we get a story from this person talking straight to camera about why she is now 33 years old and feels like she has no life. So let me summarize. I took some notes here. Let me summarize the story that she tells.

Coming out of college, she was interested in digital media, got a good internship in digital media. But then when she applied for what she described as fun media department jobs, she didn't get 'em. They kept saying, "No, you don't have enough experience." And so not able to get those jobs she desired, she fell back and said, "I'll just do retail." So she kinda fell back for retail jobs.

Some time passed, an opportunity came up for her to get a quote, "good project manager job." So this is a job with benefits, normal salary. I think this was out West. But then after a little while, she got fired and has no jobs. As she says, it was so devastating.

It's back like she was when she was looking for her original jobs after her internship. She's having a hard time finding a solid job. She did some contract work for about eight months. But now she says, "It feels like no one wants to hire me. "No one wants anything to do with me." Because they feel like she doesn't have the right experience.

It seems like her new plan, based on what she says in this video, is to make content for YouTube and hope maybe that works out. All right, so there's a couple things I wanna talk about here. First of all, I wanna say, this is a useful type of video to exist.

I think having people actually talk about the realities of their engagement with the world of work is really useful because we don't really get a clear picture, especially young people. They don't get a really clear picture about how this works. You have sort of abstract books maybe, and then you have the typical YouTube TikTok presentation of work, where it's usually a lot of people who make a living on YouTube and TikTok kinda talk about how they make a living on YouTube and TikTok.

And then maybe you get exposed to some sort of celebrity workers, famous writers and artists and sports stars, this type of thing. That's kind of it. So we don't really get exposed to a lot of the reality of how the world of work works and what to expect and how hard it can be and how emotionally hard it can be.

And so to see that and have someone just say it straight to camera, no holds barred, I think is really important. Oh, this is how the world of work can work for most people. And it's really hard. And if you're feeling emotionally drained by your difficulty in the world of work, instead of feeling like you're an outlier, you watch a video like this, you say, yeah, this is, I'm not alone.

Work is hard. We just don't hear those stories. Those stories don't get amplified. Second, however, I think this video is a good reason to revisit some ideas from my 2012 book, "So Good They Can't Ignore You." 'Cause I think in addition to being a useful window into the reality of the world of work, this video also gives a reality, a window into the reality of how a lot of people, she's a young millennial, but Gen Z probably feels the same way, but especially millennials, just when we were raised, it gives a window into some of the issues with how we think about work.

So the model that comes out of this video, at least this was my impression, was a model of work in which you figured out what you wanna do, digital media, whatever it is, and then you wait to get chosen to do it. So then someone chooses you, you say, okay, I will let you come and do this for my company.

They choose you to do it. So it's like getting into college, right? Getting accepted into graduate school. And then you're good. I got chosen, I put out my applications, and someone said, I choose you. You get to come into this world now and be a digital media, whatever. And if that doesn't happen, then you're kinda lost.

So you figure out what you wanna do. You put yourself out there. Hey, can I come do this for you? And either they say yes, and you're happy, or they say no, and then you really could end up in a hard situation. What's the alternative model to think about this?

Well, it's the model from my book, "So Good They Can't Ignore You," which is based on career capital. It says the whole job industry, the whole job market, it's all about what do you have to offer specifically that's valuable. And the collection of your rare and valuable skills, your skills that are rare and valuable to the market in general is what we call career capital.

The more of it you have, the more opportunities and leverage you have. And therefore, the whole game, especially right out of college, is building career capital as quickly as possible. It changes the way you think about things, because especially when you're young, you're not focused on what do I want my job to do for me?

All right, I found this would be, this job has all the things I want. I hope they select me. And instead turns it around and say, what can I offer to the jobs? Well, not much yet because I'm new. So let me get my foot in the door somewhere and aggressively build up rare and valuable skills.

This is the only way I have to take control over my career is to be good at things that people need. Now I can start to dictate. I want this position instead of that. I don't wanna do this work, I wanna do that work. I wanna be remote. I'm taking the summers off.

I wanna make a lot of money. I wanna live in the city. You get more and more autonomy and control of your career, the more valuable you're making yourself. And when you have this mindset, it changes the way you approach your day-to-day jobs because you approach the jobs from the standpoint of a musician who's trying to get to the first chair in the symphony, practice.

How do I get better? What am I not good at? How do I get better at that thing? Now, especially when you're young, you don't have as much going on. You have the time and energy to actually do this career capital development. When you don't have this mindset, when you have the mindset of I wanna get chosen for the job that's meant for me, it can lead to a lot of these type of traps.

And there's a lot of, I think, bad luck and unfortunate circumstances that happened in the story as well. But there was also, I think, some mindset unforced errors, right? So for example, when she didn't get chosen for the kind of dream digital media job that her internship had prepared her for, what did she say her only other option was, was just to go back to retail.

As opposed to say, well, I have a college degree and these other types of things. There's gotta be somewhere I can get in my foot in the door and start building up the skills really fast to then take more control. Oh, it's gonna take five years of building up skills to take control.

So I don't need to be in the digital media department of this place. I just need to get in somewhere and start building up skills. I can move my way over there, right? So when you get rid of the, if it's not my dream job, then why bother? I should just sort of go back and work at retail.

That's maybe an unforced error you wouldn't make if there was career capital thinking. It also just affects how you approach your work when you think about accumulating skills versus just, do I like this job? Yeah, I like this job, but maybe not. When you're just thinking about the job and if it's what you want, you're not building up aggressively your value to the organization, you're vulnerable.

And then when the downsizing happens, you might be closer to the choppy block because they don't point you and say, well, she does this for us that no one else does. She's invaluable over here or there. Of course, she's not gonna be the one we let go. So there's a mindset change that could help.

Now, of course, the whole problem with all of this is it's not the difficulty of doing this is not evenly distributed. For some people, a career capital mindset is gonna come much easier. They have many more opportunities to do it just because of who they are or the opportunities or connections they have.

It's not a fairly distributed system, but it still seems to be the way the job market works, even if it works differently for different people. So we shouldn't let our frustration with this system is not fair, hide the reality of how the system works, which is it's a market.

Skill is what matters. Building skill is the way to think about it. Hey, if you liked this video, I think you'll really like this one as well.