Social media has been, by and large, massively detrimental to my health over the years. I became a tumblr obsessive in my teenage years, hiding in my fandoms as a way of avoiding being present in a day-to-day life that I found unbearable. At the worst points I was a living zombie, staggering around the day with immense, constant suicidal ideation, immediately getting on my laptop when I got home so I could Post and not have to think about how terrible I felt.
In university, this shifted to Twitter, which was just as bad but in different ways. A daily discourse cycle introduced me to people I didn't care about, having insanely stupid opinions that made me angry but which didn't affect my life in any way. Eventually I realised that none of this was making me happy, and I scrubbed my Twitter clean.
While this has made me demonstrably happier, it has an unfortunate side effect. I love to do art, and I thrive on people seeing and enjoying my art. I also love money, and I used to do a small number of commissions every year. Now the only places I have to show off my art are discord channels, and my own Neocities website. There are basically zero opportunities to network or grow my client base, so the number of commissions I do has drastically dropped. I'd say now I do approximately two a year. A somewhat far cry from the year I ran an art-based donation drive and raised $800 for charity (pleeease let me humblebrag I have so little).
Obviously outreach and networking is a problem for traditional artists, but the issue presents itself differently for digital art. Traditional art is physical, takes up space, can be dragged outside to a market or a gallery or just to your own hallway. Digital art without social media lives on static pages or simply in your own hard drive, inert and unseen. Its shelf life is as long as it takes for someone to post their own art in the discord art channel. Which is a little dispiriting.
On the flip side, I think unplugging has made me appreciate doing art for arts sake a bit more. OBVIOUSLY A PRIVILEGE NOT AVAILABLE TO PEOPLE WHO NEED MONEY, I appreciate not thinking about metrics or hustling for a client base. My art is for me and my friends, so who cares if it's bad, or rough, or very obviously tracing a pinterest photo? If I want to draw the same original character fifty times in a row, I do, and don't wonder if I'm going to alienate my twitter followers.
I don't like that the dichotomy is between freedom and publicity. I want to be unplugged from soul-destroying social media AND show off my art. Art-centric platforms such as Pixiv are somewhat of a solution, but the available options all have disadvantages. And all share the same new threat: will my art be scraped for AI to train off? I'd rather rot in obscurity than contribute to that. So... I guess I will rot in obscurity, for now. At least I'll take my art being hidden over feeling like I need to contribute to the newest Twitter discourse cycle. And for real, nobody is calling that shit X.