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Issue 19; Social Fatigue

written by @coombstw

Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest the list is endless, but these four were my three norms, for business and personal interactions.  Sad really, but I have taken a step back. Get a coffee, sit back and let me explain how I got Social Fatigue.


If you are reading this then it is quite possible you have a mild mental problem, but also that you have or currently seen my social media output at some point in your amazing lives.  From now you will only see my on one thing, Instagram and it is not a Business page, it is just me, some simple pics and videos of stuff I get up to.

It is a technical word ‘Stuff’ honest, but what you really want is for me to explain why I have deleted by Twitter account and my FB business pages, because of this fatigue.  I’m sure we have all felt it at some point, where you realise you are getting nothing at all out of using it, if you dwell on this and carry on, eventually fatigue will turn to hate, hate turns to fear and as we all know fear turns to the Dark Side.  This maybe more for Jedi’s but Social Media can create great problems as it has such power. Don’t worry I will not quote Spiderman here. You know the responsibility one.

You may be aware or not that I used to run a copywriting company for two years I did this and it took over my life, my soul and destroyed both, so at the beginning of this year I shut it down and got a regular job.  I still do, however, write here and was also running Instagram as a business, linked to a FB business page and Twitter account. I was setting up posts for weeks in advance, spending time making videos with some production and for a bit I enjoyed continuing this even after my business stopped.  But then my brain started to go blank, I ran out of ideas, my content was all the same and boring, always worrying when you are boring yourself. And with this my likes went down and you feel down because of it.

I carried on anyway and the fatigue was getting worse but I was spending more time on all the different medias, it was a vicious circle of despair.

I recently started taking my walking a bit more seriously and want to do more and agreed to run a 10km race, my first one ever so have started training. Because my tastes and ideas were changing, I started following a few people on the Gram who do things I do.  Now some are influencers etc but some are just writers and running adventure holidays or just like hiking. I looked at some of their pages and realise they just post pictures of what they are up to when doing stuff. Their pages were not linked to any account and they didn’t post daily, their followers weren’t in the millions and the higher ones were just themselves.

Me on the other hand was still going on the train of social media despair, so stopped for a week after a recent holiday to Paris.

Then a recent epiphany hit me, screw all this social media, so Twitter is now just Instagram links, FB business page has completely gone, along with Pinterest, I have no posting app and Instagram was put back to a personal account, it was liberating.  You want me DM be bitches. 

I will still post to Instagram but could be a picture of anything, I will continue to do my Stories as find them a great place to talk about anything and everything.

If you watched Saturday Mornings with Tom, season 1 is complete and a revamped Season 2 will be done later in the year, but until then just relax and go and do other things rather stare at Social Media then share your experience, it may just change something to someone. But stay away from Instagram classic pictures, if you camp don't take the photo of your legs looking out of your tent to a great cliff view. If you actuality camped like that you would fall off the edge when you got up at night.