👋 Social media is making you lonely

It's Monday. I'm here for you.

I ran into someone I haven’t seen in five years. I curled into her for a hug.

It’s SO good to see you. My goodness, we have a lot to catch up on!

She patted me on the back and pulled away.

Jen! What is there to catch up on? I know everything about your life because I follow you on social media!

You can’t really think that you know about my life based on what you see from social media, right?

Of course I do! She said, before rambling through a list of the curated, filtered, and selective things I have posted over the years.

My life is not press clippings and smiling photos of myself with my baby. My life is not a sequin suit that I wore to a party or a trip to Montana.

Those are just the things I decided to show 15,100 strangers.

But what about the other 95,780 moments of my life?

Urges to post on social media are the same as the urges we feel to leave reviews.

We only do it when we’re feeling really good or really bad about something. But so much of life is the current of the in-between that pulls us, all over, directionless, mostly. We don’t post that, we don’t know how to show that, but that is what you need to know about somebody to know somebody.

Welcome to the Monday Pick-Me-Up. I’m so bothered by social media. I’ve lost myself on it. I’ve lost friends because of it. I’ve learned so many things.

Ps. If you know anyone who would get excited reading these Monday emails, could you share this with them?

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In August of 2023, I stopped posting every single day on Instagram.

Before that, I felt like I had to.

If I didn’t show people a glimmer of my life, they’d forget about me. I am not someone who wants to be forgotten.

So I’d think of something interesting to say, find a filter that hid my acne scars and wrinkles, and I’d record myself talking into the phone. I’d do that over and over again until I sounded witty and funny. I’d post it, put my phone down, exhale, and go back to living life as the real Jen Glantz.

If you ever get me, the real Jen Glantz, you will probably say what so many people have said to me before:

You are nothing like you are on social media.

The real Jen Glantz is shy and private.

The people who love me the most in this real world have to literally work their asses off just to get information from me about my life.

I did a podcast the other day with someone famous and blocked off Adam’s calendar with a note that said: Important podcast! Take baby and dog for an adventure out of the house please.

Who is the podcast with? Adam asked, excited to hear more.

Nobody! It’s just a podcast. I scoffed.

The real Jen Glantz is incredibly superstitious and secretive.

Adam has known me for 7-years so he knows how to get information out of me.

Celebrity or someone you just find really cool from the internet? He asked.

Jason Alexander. I gave up and confessed.

When I’d find myself in conversations with people who cringed when they thought about posting on social media, I’d always say the same thing:

If it wasn’t part of my job, I’d toss my phone in a river and never go on Instagram again.

I never wanted to be a full-time influencer. I never wanted to refresh my Instagram 1,000 times a day to check how many people liked a post, followed my account, or watched my story.

I only ever wanted to be a writer. That’s the truth.

But I learned in 2014 that being a writer will never be enough if you don’t have the support of as many strangers as possible, who must feel like they have the ability to tap and scroll through your life.

When I moved to New York City in 2012, I did what I could to make a name for myself in the writing scene. I got my work published on Thought Catalog and HuffPost. I started my own blog. I self-published an eBook that topped the charts.

In April of 2013, I signed with a literary agent named Anthony. I wrote a book called The Happiness To-Do List that was rejected by 35 publishers.

In October of 2013, Anthony dropped me.

In January of 2014, I stopped feeling like a sad little fool and rewrote the entire book. I made it different, better. My writing was picked up in a few new digital publications. My blog was getting more eyeballs on it every month.

I scooted myself back into Anthony’s inbox.

Me again…I said in a nicer more professional way. I shared with him all the updates. I asked him to pitch the book again. This is what he said:

Anthony said I needed a platform. Not just any platform because the one I already had wasn’t HUGE enough. If I wanted to be seen, I needed to explode.

This was in 2014, so Anthony gave me this direction:

I wanted to be a published author so badly, more than anything, so I followed his advice.

I’d write less and I’d use social media more.

A Facebook status about a bad date I went on where the guy sneezed on our shared guacamole and then continued to eat it got me 50 new followers.

A series of live tweets while watching The Bachelor would get me 300 new followers on Twitter.

Then Instagram came along…

I’m not meant to stand in front of a camera and pose perfectly. I’m meant to unravel in front of an audience with my delicate words.

Which is why I’m here and I love being here with you.

But that is why I gave so much to social media over the years. Because Anthony told me to and he was right.

I sold a different book to Simon and Schuster in 2017. Not with Anthony. Part of the book proposal was of course samples of my writing but also the backend metrics of my social media accounts.

The social media Jen Glantz was exhausting. Of course it was me. I wasn’t lying. But it wasn’t alllllllllllllllll of me. There’s a difference.

Last year, a lot changed. I had a baby. Someone in my life, around my age, passed away. It all kind of hit me that I don’t want to be the person who spends so much time holding up a phone and showing the world a version of me that’s me, with holes.

I can keep doing forever and it will never be enough.

I had an influencer manager call me up the other day. I told her that in total I have 110,000 followers across all my social media platforms and 150k newsletter subscribers across all my newsletters.

That’s not impressive at all. She said. Just to level set with you, It’s quite small to be honest.

She was on speaker phone as I was playing peekaboo with Gemma, who was laughing at me like I was the funniest person in the world.

This is more impressive than those stupid numbers, I thought to myself.

You know a lot of it isn’t real, right? The influencers telling you to buy microwaveable meals for dinner don’t find them delicious. They are super plain tasting but the influencer is getting paid $45,000 to tell you that’s what she has to eat every single night.

I turned down $18,000 because I didn’t feel comfortable promoting botox. I really could have used that money but It just didn’t feel right. I said no. I saw three other influencers do it instead.

You know the mom hoping on Instagram telling you that motherhood is the greatest joy of her life, isn’t lying to you, she’s not showing you the moments she covered in thick layers of poop from a blowout diaper or the hour she spent in the back of the closet because postpartum hormones make you feel like you’re choking on your own emotions and no one can save you. You know the couple posting about how much they love each other might have broken up last week because one of them was being sketchy about where he went on Saturday night with the boys but they didn’t post that on Facebook, duh. The person on LinkedIn bragging about how they quit their job to become a life coach and now they are making six-figures isn’t showing you their tax return because….maybe they aren’t actually making six-figures…either way, no one is fact checking them. No one is fact-checking anyone.

Every single person on social media has an agenda. They have a why for what they are posting. Even if they want to be transparent, there’s no way they can show you all the other parts of their life. It’s a blurred perspective. It’s not the full picture.

You are not seeing enough to know them, understand them, or want to be them.

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Back in 2018, my best friend at the time, met me on the corner of fifth avenue and 23rd street to crush my heart.

I don’t want to be your friend anymore, she said, out of nowhere.

I got so dizzy, I had to sit on the pavement.

I begged her to tell me why and how I could fix things between us.

She struggled to give me an answer and mostly just said that our friendship was over without being able to say why.

In between seeing stars, I remember her saying something about how she knows nothing about me anymore and instead has to find everything out on social media.

What are you talking about? You know everything about me!

Then why do I log onto twitter and see that you wrote an article about something I didn’t know about?

I didn’t have the words or the wherewithal to fight back then but i’ve thought about this for years.

She didn’t know that articles I posted were on delay. They were from months ago. Most of what I write about and even what I share on social media isn’t from real-time. It’s from the past. I didn’t share timestamps on Tweets or articles from my life. I just shared them and assumed people knew they weren’t from that day.

I wish I could explain that to her but I was never able to. Instead, it’s made me dislike social media even more.

I wish I could also say that I’ve since changed. That people in my real life know my life isn’t just what I post on social media but that’s not the case either.

I had to cancel plans with a good friend last week because I was struggling. I told her I was going through a rough time and she said she’d have no idea from what she’s seeing on social media.

Nooo, it’s not everything, it’s not the whole picture, it’s not enough to know a person.

I’ve pulled back from social media. Even though the money is good, I don’t think I want to be an influencer. I just want to write. I have always just wanted to write.

I want real friendships and people in my real life who know the messiest parts of me, from the acne scars to the smell of my tears, to the dark stories of my past, and love me for who I fully am. It won’t be 100,000 people, it won’t even be enough to support a best selling book launch, but for now, it’s impressive to me, and it’s all that I want.

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⚡Instant Pick Me Ups

📚: Jumping on the Colleen Hoover train with this book now. Listening to the audio version.

🎵: Good background music for focused work.

🛍️: When I don’t know what to give people for a gift, I give them this.

Ps. a full list of pick-me-ups are right here.

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Why you’re getting this: I'm Jen Glantz and this is The Monday Pick-Me-Up newsletter. I've been sending it every Monday, for 9-years, to thousands of awesome humans, just like you. Thank you for letting this email live in your inbox. It truly makes my heart explode with joy.

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