Waiting for the Internet to Cheer
Here is a small confession. Every time I put something into the world, some part of me expects a parade.
I have, on paper, thousands of connections. LinkedIn tells me so in a confident little number near my name. Add in all the people I have met over the years across two continents in advertising and music, and it starts to feel like a stadium. So when I press publish, I picture a stadium full of fans rising to their feet. I can hear the roar.
What I get is closer to a polite cough and a scraping chair. A sneaked fart far off in the back of the library.
Likes trickle in. A cousin comments. Someone I have not spoken to since 1994 leaves a thumbs up and then vanishes back into the fog. The number near my name, so promising an hour ago, now feels like a cruel joke. Where is everyone? I gave them a stadium seat. The least they could do is sit in it.
And then, if I am honest with myself, I remember what I did this morning.
This morning someone posted and it made it to my feed. A milestone. A thought they had clearly sat with for a while before sharing. And I scrolled past it in about the time it takes to blink. I did not read it. I did not offer applause. I gave the proverbial “rat’s patootie.” Roughly the equivalent of the attention I give a passing lamppost, and I felt nothing about it, because I was busy, and because it was their thing and not mine.
That’s the whole game of mental twister, isn't it. My default setting is that I do not have a spare second for the content everyone else is throwing down online. But let one person fail to give my nonsense their full and adoring attention, and I am wounded. Personally. As though they owed me.
They don't. Nobody does.
Here is the thing I keep having to learn, which is a polite way of saying I have not actually learned it yet. Attention is not love. A like is not a verdict on your worth. The silence after you post is not the world telling you that your work is unworthy. It is just the world doing exactly what it always does. We are subject to a thousand small announcements on our phones, computers, buses, billboards, wrappers, shirts, and so on.
“Attention is not love. A like is not a verdict on your worth. The silence after you post is not the world telling you that your work is small.”
Everyone is the main character of their own scroll. You are a supporting actor in everyone else's, if you are lucky enough to be in the shot at all. This is not cruelty. It is arithmetic. There are simply too many of us shouting for anyone to hear more than a sliver, and the sliver that hears you was never going to be the roar you imagined.
So I am trying to make my peace with the cough instead of the roar.
Part of that is admitting it really is a numbers game. If you tell two thousand people something and forty of them react, that is not rejection. That is a completely ordinary response rate on a platform engineered to keep everyone half-distracted and slightly anxious. The other one thousand nine hundred and sixty are not snubbing you. They never saw it. An algorithm you will never meet decided your moment was not the moment, and it moved along.
The harder part is reminding myself why I make the thing in the first place. There is a part of me that writes for the little number, sure. I’m a lab rat and you are the pellets. But mostly I write because I have something I want to say and a stubborn need to say it well. The saying is the reward. Everything after publish is weather. Sometimes it is sunny and sometimes it drizzles, and either way the work already happened and cannot be un-happened by a quiet afternoon on LinkedIn.
Social media, let us be honest, is a filthy swamp anyway. It is built to make you feel precisely this: hungry for a response, then slightly poorer for having wanted it. The genius of the machine is that it sells you the stadium and delivers the cough, and then invites you to come back and try the whole thing again tomorrow.
I will try again tomorrow. Of course I will. But I am going to try to do it with lower expectations and a shorter memory, and with a bit more patience for the other guy, whose post I really should go back and read.
He probably deserved the parade more than I did.
A confession to close the confession. I am about to test every word of this. My book, Barking at Dogs, comes out on 30 September, and I already know I will be right back here, refreshing the little number and pretending I am not. It is a memoir in stories from the ragged edges of late-apartheid South Africa, funny, profane, and true and true-ish by turns.
If it moves you, a quiet word of mouth will mean more to me than any parade. And if you scroll straight past this, I understand completely. I did the same to a better post than mine this morning.