Overwhelmed

How social media can help when we're struggling

This newsletter is late. Again.

I haven’t received any complaints, but when I don’t write regularly, I feel like I’m failing on a promise I made to myself to be a voice pointing out the many vital and life-affirming uses of social media. In a landscape where most “experts” and elected officials reduce social networks to a political and/or mental health threat (see the TikTok hearing), it’s important to highlight how social media empowers positive, non-political human interaction as well as apolitical creative, entrepreneurial, and educational pursuits.

There are so many ways humans express themselves and connect (for good) in digital spaces.

I’m trying to put pieces into place that will allow me to responsibly invest more of my professional time into helping people navigate the digital world with intention, harnessing the power of social media to share and learn better ways of knowing, being, and coming together. But I’m feeling overwhelmed.

That’s the word I keep coming back to in trying to describe how I’ve felt for the past several months — perhaps even years.

Too many things to keep track of. To coordinate. To manage. To follow up on. To drive to.

For myself. For my business. For my kids. For my extended family and friends. For my community. For the planet.

Too many things to expend brainpower and time and energy and worry on.

I know I’m not alone. Almost every catch-up conversation with friends and colleagues opens with mutual riffs on I’m tired. So far behind. Too busy. Just gotta get through the next few weeks. Failing at life these days. Feel like I’m drowning.

Does any of that sound familiar to you?

The word “burnout” has been tossed around in popular media a lot lately. Maybe I’m experiencing that too, but I’m pretty sure I — and a whole lot of other people — are simply overwhelmed by the never-ending to-do list required to exist (much less thrive) in the world we find ourselves in.

In Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live), Eve Rodsky details how she applied her organizational management expertise and a considerable amount of qualitative and academic research to develop a system for couples to achieve “balance, efficiency, and peace in their lives.” The result is a deck of 100 task cards — 60 cards for couples without children and an additional 40 cards for couples with kids — that may be “in play” in a given household. (That’s right, she identified 60-100 tasks required to manage a household.)

The cards cover “daily grind” activities like dishes, transportation, and morning routine; other tasks within the “domestic ecosystem” like social plans, money management, holidays; and life-changing scenarios like births, deaths, new jobs, or aging/ailing parents. The goal of the Fair Play system is to balance the deck as fairly (not equally) as possible between a couple, and to regularly re-deal the deck to ensure that neither member of the couple carries too heavy a burden and/or is performing unacknowledged labor.

It’s a smart, thoughtful, thorough system for sharing the burdens of managing a household. The system, though, is built for two adults to tackle all the tasks. What about households with only one adult? If the “ideal” of two adults is fraught with difficulty and hardship, how is one person supposed to keep up?

The book doesn’t answer that. But I got misty-eyed when I read Rodsky’s dedication to the single mother who raised her: “Thank you for holding all the cards for our little three-person family … lots of sh*t may have fallen through the cracks but your love never did.” As a single mother raising two kids, I perpetually feel like all sorts of sh*t is falling through the cracks. I struggle to manage the unique needs of both children, run my business, maintain my household, and take care of myself. (It’s the household maintenance and self-care that get relegated to the bottom of my to-do list.)

The Fair Play system doesn’t have much application for me, but it helped me better understand and articulate one big reason I’ve been feeling overwhelmed for so long. I’m trying to do something alone that two people working together have difficulty handling.

It’s a sentiment I see and hear a lot: stories about how our systems aren’t working even for people in supposedly ideal or privileged situations … and an increasing awareness of how much harder it must be for those who don’t have those advantages.

Social media is often blamed for adding to the overwhelm in our lives, but what if it’s a magnifying glass, helping us better see how unsustainable the dominant narratives and expectations in our society are? And what if it’s also a doorway to more balanced and healthier outlooks?

“Information overload, 24-hour connectivity, countless but superficial and often adverse social media relationships, and heightened competition from globalization have escalated the level of stress in modern society,” says neuropsychiatrist Dr. Dilip Jeste in Wiser: The Scientific Roots of Wisdom, Compassion, and What Makes Us Good. But he adds that new technologies merely “amplify … already existing powers, capacities, and intentions.”

Long before the advent of social media, we were conditioned to navigate the world as perpetual consumers and strivers — always pursuing more, never finding contentment — to fuel economic models where infinite growth and increasing profits equal “success.” Social media didn’t create the problem of monetizing humans, it just makes it painfully obvious how market rhetoric has overtaken everything. “If you sometimes find social media galling, with its currencies of likes, shares, retweets, and vote-ups, it is the crass materialism of such systems that you are reacting against,” says J.B. MacKinnon in The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves.

Pretty much everyone has a beef with social network algorithms designed to maximize engagement, yet engagement maximization metrics still dominate discussions about “successful” social media strategies. The structure of the platforms nudge us into evaluating our digital behavior through the lens of a performer or marketer/advertiser, not as a human being expressing ourselves in whatever way is meaningful to us and connects us with other humans. Market rhetoric (ie, the glorification of hustle and money-making) has become pop culture, says journalist Will Storr in Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us, and the norms and values of the corporation dictate much of how we behave in our daily lives.

At the same time, though, social media empowers collaboration and communal care on a grand scale. According to global market trends expert Mauro F. Guillén in 2030: How Today's Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything, the “sharing class” is a “new social category is being ushered in by technology … defined by lifestyle, not property … part of the broader ‘collaborative economy,’ which also includes peer-to-peer lending, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, reselling, co-working, co-freelancing, and many other ways of cooperating online.” He says this new class “challenges fundamental assumptions and aspirations held for generations, even millennia” regarding private property.

Visit any “mutual aid” group on Facebook, and you’ll see countless examples of people voluntarily helping those who are struggling and overwhelmed. The aid rendered by humans for humans is often faster, more targeted to the specific need, and more generous than aid distributed through organizations which have to adhere to one-size-fits-all policies and procedures.

If you visit these groups, you’ll also see how many amongst us are finding it difficult to keep up with all the pressures and demands of our bureaucratic, dehumanizing, and wealth-driven society. Most people aren’t seeking extravagant, luxurious things, they’re asking for help finding jobs, child care, transportation; keeping a roof over their family’s head; accessing and paying for necessary medical care; temporarily covering basic needs like food, clothing, and utilities; and getting the word out about the businesses and side gigs that account for some or all of their income.

“Our dominant societal values, the underlying drivers of our economy and culture, are fundamentally oppositional to sustained well-being,” says Jeremy Lent in The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe. Lent, a former founder and CEO of an internet company, is now president of the Liology Institute, an organization dedicated to fostering a worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the earth. “The only way we can truly change our trajectory,” he says, “is by approaching society’s problems from the foundation of an alternative worldview—one that affirms life rather than the accumulation of wealth above all else.”

Social media lets us see we’re not alone in our overwhelm and provides mechanisms for taking action to help each other. It helps us build life-affirming connections with fellow humans far beyond our physical social spheres, creating new ways forward together.

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I’ll close with an example near and dear to my heart (and familiar to many of my new subscribers).

On May 15, 2020, as pandemic dining shutdowns loomed, Matthew Schniper, then Food & Drink Editor for the Colorado Springs Independent, co-founded the Facebook group Culinary Distancing COS with me. It was conceived as a safe, uplifting digital space (no business-bashing, negative or divisive posts allowed) to show community support for the food and drink industry during unprecedented challenges to businesses and livelihoods.

The restaurants felt the love: “It can easily seem like we’re being forgotten and then someone will post something about one of our restaurants and it helps you see how supportive everyone wants to be to keep us all open,” one owner wrote in a survey. Thirty percent of group members selected “having a safe and positive space to connect with people” as one of the things they liked most about the group. As one member said, “I enjoy seeing people connecting and sharing positivity when everything else in the world is just so, so bleak. This reminds me that we're all in this together.”

According to a social return on investment study (SROI) conducted by the Colorado Institute for Social Impact, over the course of a year (March 2020 to March 2021), the total contributions of the Facebook group toward strengthening the community were nearly $1.1 million. Matthew’s credibility, expertise, and ability to connect eaters/drinkers with food and drink businesses had a big impact.

On March 15, 2023, exactly three years to the day we started Culinary Distancing COS, Matthew (along with half the staff of the Colorado Springs Independent) was laid off, bringing an end to his 17-year career with the newspaper.

When he announced the layoff on Facebook, his post was met with well wishes and words of encouragement, as well as gratitude for the many ways he contributed to the food and drink industry over the years. The outpouring of support inspired him to push through the overwhelm and launch Side Dish with Schniper, his own Substack newsletter, to continue coverage of the local culinary scene.

Based on social media activity, the community is enthusiastically embracing Mathew’s new venture, not only by subscribing, but by sharing stories about his impact and contributing in various ways. Formosa Bites, a Taiwanese street food restaurant, posted about the owner’s own experience with being laid off, referring to Matthew as “our 貴人 (guì rén), loosely translated to a helpful person at pivotal moments of our lives.” Ryan Hannigan, Focus on the Beer podcaster/blogger and forthcoming Wrap Rascals food-truck-owner took it upon himself to create a logo for the newsletter.

People are helping Matthew like he helps them.

“[T]he way in which each of us chooses to engage with the world, no matter how insignificant it might seem … matters,” says Lent. Purposeful use of social media makes a big difference in real lives.