Attention & creativity beyond social media

Amelia Hruby on attention, the trap of flow state, and the internet we deserve

Welcome to Meet My Art Friend, my interview series with fellow creative friends. Today we’re joined by Amelia Hruby, one of my absolute favorite people on the internet!

Amelia is the host of Off the Grid, a podcast for artists and small business owners who want to leave social media without losing all their income. I’ve been comforted and invigorated by so many of Amelia’s podcast episodes, and enjoy being part of the community that she cultivates within her membership group The Interweb.

Now she’s distilled many of her insights on leaving social media into her book Your Attention is Sacred Except on Social Media, which just came out this week! Stick around until the end to find out how to grab your copy, along with a special offer just for SEE YOU readers.

Meet Amelia Hruby

What was your personal breaking point with social media? Were you able to cut cold turkey or did it take you a long time to leave?

My breaking point with social media was realizing that it made me feel bad about myself and my creative work more than it made me feel good. I recognized that I was getting into some familiar patterns around anxiety and codependency in my relationship to Instagram that I didn’t want, and I felt I needed to leave the app to break off those patterns.

I also realized that social media wasn’t as effective at selling my book and other products as I thought. I really thought Instagram was going to make my first book a success, and then it kind of didn’t. So that was an eye-opening moment—Instagram made me feel bad, and it didn’t even work.

The last layer was reading Shoshana Zuboff’s book on surveillance capitalism. That really opened my eyes to how my data is being mined all the time. When I had that degree of clarity, I just had to go. I didn’t feel like I had another option but to leave.

I am curious about how there’s an ironic trend of leaving social media that’s circulating on social media. What are your thoughts on people creating hierarchies of platforms, such as longform being better than shortform, or Substack being better than Instagram?

I think when people create a hierarchy of good to bad social media, they’re trying to answer what feels more manipulative, more extractive, more algorithmically determined. Where do they feel like they have more agency to be creative or to share things or to do what they want on social media or on the internet more broadly?

But if the platform is a walled garden run by an algorithm that’s invested in keeping you there longer, it falls into social media. It’s going to keep repeating the same things we’ve seen on every other platform. So I really like to encourage people to invest in meaningful relationships, to connect with actual people, and to think of any platform as secondary. I’m only interested in giving my time and energy and work to non-extractive platforms where I don’t see that same type or model of extraction.

I don’t enjoy using Instagram, but I rationalize to myself that if I use it in a transactional way to promote my work to match what the platform values, then maybe I can learn to live with it. Would you say an approach like that could still be unsustainable or unfulfilling? And why might that be?

“Hard on the system, soft on the people” is a saying I like to cite a lot because I’m not interested in being hard on any individual social media user and how they use it. But to respond more directly to your question, I would ask: how does it feel for you? Does it feel unfulfilling or unsustainable to you? People have different tolerances for how much they can do before they feel like they can’t do it anymore.

Some people excel at playing that internet performativity game, and there are a million playbooks out there for how to do that. With Off The Grid and my book, I’m trying to give us the seeds of self-belief that we can do something differently. And we can find things that are fulfilling and sustainable. They may not be the most obvious answers out there, but if we are creatives and artists, we don’t want the obvious answer anyway.

One thing I really enjoyed while reading Your Attention is Sacred is how much it begins with philosophy and etymology, and then moves into concrete guidance. Did the book come from the philosophy first or the practical takeaways? How did it all coagulate?

The book is definitely the integration of the first three years of Off the Grid, in which I made over 100 episodes of the show. About two years in I started to notice that when I brought guests on to talk about something, I had a really strong point of view about the topic that I was trying to shoehorn in. I realized I had developed a clear point of view that was probably worth writing down.

Once I opened myself up to writing a book, it became very clear what the book wanted to be. It truly felt like a divine download. Once I knew the book’s structure, I started collecting inspiration. I started going on walks and recording voice notes and then transcribing those to see what wanted to arrive on these topics. Then I went to a hotel in my city for a week and wrote the entire first draft of the manuscript in four days.

The first two chapters, as you’ve said, are densely philosophical in some ways. And then you helped clarify the third chapter when you invited me to write the five rules [manifesto]. That became the crystallizing moment that shaped the structure of the third chapter.

The first 250 people who order Amelias book will get this 5 Rules postcard from Rules to Live By! The other postcard is another bonus made by artist Debora Figueiredo!

You write about human agency and how it’s shaped by the difficulty of determining what to do versus being told what to do. I see this struggle with beginner artists who want to cultivate a relationship with creativity, so they look to social media for inspiration. Then they find it difficult to cultivate their own artistic voice. For artists trying to leave social media, how would you recommend navigating that transition from external guidance to inner voice?

Every artist traverses that spectrum from reactivity to generativity. Sometimes you have to be super responsive to current events and create things that are in conversation. But every artist I know with a sustainable, long-term career also creates work that they’re generating from within. They have seeds of ideas that they receive and cultivate, tending to them and then bringing them into the world.

If you’re only ever creating in response to trends, you will never make timeless art. I would encourage any artist who wants to shift away from reactivity to just begin listening—listening to yourself, listening to the world around you, listening to anything that is not on your phone or computer. It can begin with stillness of just sitting and being, or with a walk a day where you’re moving through the world.

That’s how I think you shift from reactivity to a more generative approach. You have to hear what you want to create and see what’s happening around you that you genuinely want to respond to.

One of my favorite lines of your book is actually a footnote about flow. You mention how writers and thinkers now “seem to valorize the flow state as the antithesis to and cure for the fragmentation of our attention on social media.” Why do you think glorifying flow state is ultimately another trap?

I’ll be the first to say that I have been in a flow state, and it feels great. I love when you can feel that sense of creative generativity that takes you out of time. But I don’t think we can live in flow all of the time because we have material bodies and physical needs that need tending.

Something I notice with artists or small business owners is that if they cannot be in flow, then they feel like they cannot access their creative work. This expectation can get built up so that you build all these conditions to get into your flow state. And it basically puts all these brick walls around it and makes it inaccessible to you.

I’m much more interested in the multiplicity and diversity of types of attention. This is why I love neurodivergence—there are so many ways that we can interact with and tend to the world, which to me is the definition of attention. We all have unique modes of giving attention to the world, and I want each of us to find that.

A black swallowtail caterpillar spotted in Amelia’s garden

A big throughline in your book is the metaphor of gardening for cultivating attention. I find that this sort of gardening metaphor comes up a lot—in Jenny Odell’s Saving Time, or in digital gardening. Why do you think gardening has become such a powerful metaphor in this technology dominant culture?

As our lives have gone more online, we feel more and more alienated from the natural world. Gardening becomes this very manageable way that we can begin to tend to the earth again.

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about how colonialism convinced us that we’re separate from nature, when in fact, we are nature. For those of us who live in cities and don’t just have unfettered access to nature, tending to one plant or a small garden plot is a way that we can begin to re-immerse ourselves in the cycles and seasons of the natural world. When we do that, we start to see ourselves as part of the natural world.

My vision for a future world goes beyond each of us having our own garden that we tend to. Instead we’d have a more integrated sense of place on the planet. It’s also why I try to frame cultivating attention in a broader context of ecology rather than just gardening.

At the end of the book, you share a list of 100 ways to share your work and life off social media. I’m curious if you have an all time favorite from that list, like a method or a way that you could never live without.

I could truly never live without an email list. I don’t know how I would even process my own feelings sometimes if I wasn’t writing about them to share them with people.

Another thing I’m hoping to do after the book is out is to put up a billboard for the book, which feels outlandish and silly because this isn’t the kind of book that sells on a billboard. But I think I’m going to do it and just see what happens!

You mentioned your desire for a non-extractive internet. Do you have any favorite personal examples that you think are moving in the right direction?

I’m always looking at what my friends are doing online and what their websites are like. I’d love to witness the world-building that we can each do as we build a personal website. People I’d point to for that would be like my friend Kening Zhu or Cody Cook-Parrott.

But even bigger than that, I actually think this vision of non-extractive internet will break open the personal brand and give us interconnection. I’m looking to things like the Fediverse, which is very much based on decentralization and open source, where the things you create and share online are not limited to one platform because they’re interconnected services that are not owned by one company.

I also love bopping around my favorite blogs from days past. I still read Cup of Jo or swissmiss regularly. My favorite lo-fi technology is having a bookmarks folder in your web browser and going to all of the pages a couple times a month. I still do that, and I love it.

Reading Your Attention is Sacred and talking with Amelia has given me both practical tools for tending to my attention offline and hopeful visions for building a more interconnected, fun, and non-extractive internet. Thank you Amelia for your clarity and wisdom!

You can now get your copy of Amelia’s book Your Attention is Sacred in either paperback or e-book here. You can also buy book bundles that come with an audiobook and a ticket to the Off The Grid Retreat happening November 5-7, where you can connect with other readers navigating life beyond social media. Amelia has generously provided us a discount code for book bundles—just use SEEYOU at checkout to get 10% off!