WHAT IF THERE WAS NO SOCIAL MEDIA

 

What would you do if you actually needed someone to know something?

  

At work, nobody hints. You don’t drop a passive-aggressive line in a message and hope someone reads between the lines. You just say the thing. The deadline moved. The client is upset. I need this by Friday. Directness at work isn’t a personality trait, it’s just the baseline. The job doesn’t work otherwise.

So why does that skill disappear the moment it’s not about work anymore?

If you actually needed someone in your life to know something, you’d call them. You’d text them straight out. You’d say it to their face. That’s what wanting someone looks like when it’s real.

But that’s not what most of us do anymore. Outside of work, we found a way to communicate without communicating. To be seen without being known. To send a signal without ever taking responsibility for it. Like a narcissist baiting their next supply.

A story goes up instead of a text. A vague caption goes out instead of an invitation. You don’t say “I want to see you,” you post something wistful and hope the right person taps through and gets the message.

Artists do it with their shows. DJs do this with their gigs. Most do it with their own personal lives, ironically. Instead of calling the five people they actually want in the room, they post to everyone and hope the right ones show up. The invitation never gets sent. It gets published.

Here’s the part that’s actually costly about it: broadcasting feels like connection but it isn’t. It’s a performance that happens to have an audience. Nobody has to answer a story or has to reject it either, and that’s exactly why we default to it. It’s the version of reaching out that can’t hurt you, because you never really reached.

But then again… it also never really lands.

If the apps vanished tomorrow, we’d have to relearn something we already know how to do at work, just aimed somewhere scarier. How to want something out loud. How to say “I was thinking about you” as its own complete sentence, not a caption waiting for the right person to notice it.

None of this means you owe everyone your directness, though. It’s not a policy, it’s a filter you save for those who’d actually meet you there.

 

Nature, music, life, and spirit find their way into everything I make, whether digital or traditional. If a piece calls to you or you’d like to create something together, reach out at writeme@lheanstorm.com