Socials have a bad rep for a good reason.

They ruin lives.

But!

It doesn’t have to stay that way.

It took over 60 years before cars had seatbelts! Imagine the lives lost while legislation caught up.

So too is our use of social media growing up.

Sadly, social policy always takes a few decades to catch up to technological progress. We get infinite energy and what do we do with it? Bomb people. Then, after the fallout we stand back and think maybe we shouldn’t bomb people. Vehicles, electricity, internet, email protocol, it’s the same thing over and over.

First comes the horrors, then the policy follows.

This will not be a post about AI, but… goes without saying.

Humans learn the hard way.

Well, I’ve learned the hard way how to put my damn seatbelt on when I ride my social media.

In this write up I’ll share my story of how my relationship to socials changed over time, the experiments that have changed my life and finally how I’m using socials as a vehicle to help me get where I want to go, in the driver’s seat (with my seatbelt on!).

Why does social media suck?

Because of the paradox of abundance (David Perell article).

Environments of abundance are bad for the median consumer but extremely good for a small number of conscious ones. – David Perell

People are driven by feelings.

Jealousy, greed, frustration, envy, attachment.

This makes them easy to exploit. If you said to yourself ‘that’s not me’ then jokes on you pal it’s likely exactly you. We buy things we regret, we eat food that comes back to bite us, we get into relationships that don’t make sense, we put up with things we ‘know’ we ‘shouldn’t’.

Social media sucks for the unconscious consumer. If you’re someone who scrolls away looking for input, the algorithm will feed you what it knows will hold your attention, which is probably some degree of emotionally exploitative drivel.

Now, AI powered!

This heartless, exploitative algorithmic thinking might be upsetting or frustrating to you, and fair enough, but it’s here to stay. Just like the industrial revolution, children are being harnessed once again except this time it’s not their fingers and lungs harvested for profit, it’s their attention and identity.

We all fall prey to the ‘Availability Bias’ meaning we think something happens often because we saw it recently. How do you think the Availability Bias influences you after 6 hours of scrolling through Facebook? How do you think it influences your kids?

If we scope out and look at when any new technology hits the market, this is the same. People find ways to hurt themselves and each other with it.

We can be smarter than that, there are seatbelts now.

The fact is, the tools are there, they’re simple to use, just like a seatbelt. But that doesn’t mean everyone will use them, does it? In order to adopt the shift from dangerous to safe, we’ve got to make a mindset change from unconscious to conscious.

This is a huge topic, so we can cover consciousness another time (join my mail list to find out when!) and for now let’s keep it simple and straightforward.

The most powerful mindset shift to harness social media.

Move from unconscious consumption to conscious curation.

For this to happen, we have to do some uncomfortable things.

Let me share a story about moving from unconscious to conscious.

The year was 2011 and I lived with a bunch of other young men. We ribbed each other, bullied each other, pressured each other, even stole from each other, all totally unconscious about the pain we spread. Eventually my partner at the time started coming over and one day she asked me, ‘Why does everyone treat you so differently? They all like, knock on your door. They don’t knock on anyone else’s door.’

I’d never noticed… But she was right.

People treated my room as this… different space. There was no smoking in my room, no coming and going whenever you like. It was different from the rest of the townhouse even from other people’s rooms.

But it wasn’t always like that, only a few months prior I didn’t even have a room of my own.

I’d been sleeping and living on couches, in open spaces, for years.

No privacy.

No boundaries.

No space of my own.

So once I got a room of my own, I quickly put a lock on the damn door!

It was an unconscious shift, out of my awareness, meaning I was simply responding to the feeling of hurt and frustration I had and the voice that accompanied it ‘omg I’m so SICK of people coming and going as they please’.

Although I did all the steps (research, shopping, installing it etc) I didn’t truly realise what I’d done until someone showed me.

She revealed to me all the meaning hidden behind the choice. The meaning which spoke to me about my subconscious, about my wants, needs and desires, and about my values!

Many years later I still have that lock in place, not literally, but metaphorically.

I put a lock on who has access to my bedroom, the place most intimate to me.

Since then, the entire cast of people in my life, main characters, side characters, guests who appear for an episode or a season or maybe just a reason… the entire cast has changed multiple times.

Because the lock has changed too.

The doorway asking them to knock before they came in, to put out a cigarette, consider my state of mind, or think twice about ‘borrowing’ something, that lock became more sophisticated and reliable as I did more healing and continued to meet people more aligned with my values.

I now use a simple filter to decide whether to spend time with someone.

Do they value what I want, or want what I value?

This is the test for anyone who wants to enter my inner circle.

The bedroom of my heart, a place where intimacy, vulnerability and struggle are safe to share.

I think of it like this, for the people who don’t get into my bedroom, I invite them into my garden. I’m happy to connect lightly, to spend time together in the sun, toiling or doing something meaningful or fulfilling.

In other words I protect the space in my heart, I keep it safe and inviting for those who earn their place.

I curate my social media like I curate my relationships.

This means I don’t give time to the things that feed base instinct.

Just like the friends who…

Want to go drinking with me.

Want to take drugs with me.

Want to spend money they can’t afford to spend.

All of the friends who don’t do the things I want to do, who don’t enjoy the activities and lifestyle that I enjoy, they’re friends I don’t spend much time with any more.

Not because I avoid them, but because we are only able to connect on common ground, of which there is less now I don’t drink or do drugs.

I spend time with people who inspire me, entertain me, educate me, make me a person more aligned with my values (side note, I’ve built a whole values survey to help you and or your partner easily see what your values are as a thank you for people who read my emails, so jump on the list!).

I spend time with people I look up to, people who have my respect, who even have my admiration. I want to be like them. I want to have more generosity, more abundance, more laughter, more lightness of being. I want to surround myself with people who want to make a positive impact and help others.

I spend time with people who look up to me, who appreciate and value my time, who show humility and a desire to learn and apply what they learn. People who want to grow and serve at higher levels.

Why would I not treat social media the exact same way?

Because of the paradox of abundance. When I’m overwhelmed it’s hard to resist the dopamine hamster wheel.

This paradigm shift is a mental one, some parts philosophical, other parts spiritual.

I moved from unconscious consumption to conscious curation.

Have you ever found google search really frustrating?

My friend did and completely gave up on it forever.

Before he told me I’d taken it for granted that if I had a problem… I googled it.

Including problems using google!

I discovered search queries when I was 13. I used the subtract query often, I found the filetype: option, there were so many incredible tools I’d found because I… why exactly?

Why did I, on one hand, discover these tools, yet on the other my friend didn’t?

Why did I find it so basic and simple to… seek out the solutions to the questions I wanted, while others didn’t?

I think it’s because my curiosity was stronger than my emotions.

Maybe I had better knowledge of handling feelings. Maybe I had a safer environment for it, so they didn’t control me as strongly. Maybe many things.

While I had google search down, I really didn’t have boundaries.

Overcoming this lack of boundaries required conscious effort.

Writing, journaling, talking, psychology (lessons), learning, reading, research, above all I gave it curiosity.

I cultivated the question in my heart: If there were a good way to ‘be’ so I didn’t feel like this, what would that look like?

If there were a good way to ‘be’ in relationships, it would be feeling trust and safety.

Years of experience told me I needed to be trustworthy and safe in order to feel trustworthy and safe. I actually had to learn this the hard way by being a lying coward for long enough that it caused enough of a trainwreck in other people’s lives for me to finally pay attention.

If there were a good way to ‘be’ on social media, it would be feeling inspired and connected.

Years of experience told me I needed to be inspiring and connecting in order to feel that way toward social media.

But if I wasn’t conscious, I would never be able to connect the dots and discover which behaviours would lead to inspiration and connection.

I had to grow more conscious by first observing my own behaviour.

To measure self control, observe scrolling.

Courage, inspiration, education, business, empowerment, inclusion, learned optimism, trauma healing, personal development, communication skills, system design.

These are all things that regularly pop up in my socials.

I train my attention and focus to bring me closer to winning in these fields. I ignore, mute or unfollow anything that doesn’t help.

No victimhood, no disempowerment, no hate bait, no porn, no thot traps.

I don’t engage in controversial news, I don’t tolerate anything that generates hate or anger inside me. Maybe you find it important to do that, good for you! I’m just some random guy sharing on the internet.

I want to stack the odds that my subconscious will work in my favour, to bring more uplifting, optimistic and empowering information to the surface. To hijack the availability bias so it’s working for my highest values not against them!

Socials are an incredibly powerful tool for connection and inspiration, but so many people struggle to break through and take advantage of them.

So many find social media disheartening.

They know their account will never get as many likes as the people they follow or look up to.

The problem here is similar to a beginner at swimming trying to compare themselves to an Olympian.

The truth is you wont get the validation you’re after, just like that Olympian you admire wasn’t able to get the gold until they spent an epic amount of effort, time and energy learning how to.

Don’t compare your chapter 2 to their chapter 32.

If you want to learn to put yourself out there, let go of attachment to outcomes by focusing on the skills you’re developing along the journey.

Attempting to gain influence in public leads to growing so many skills.

Confidence, diction, dynamics of speech, videography, editing, graphics, lighting, framing, copy, scripting, descriptions, thumbnails, titles.

Hell, doing this will stretch you in ways you wont even predict, like management of expectations or even strengthening your resistance to the pull of validation.

So, what social media experiments changed my life?

Using some bits and pieces of self knowledge, social media has become an incredible force for transformation in my life.

I’ve used it to;

• break through creative resistance and publish over 50,000 words in a short few months,
• create an always-available accountability partner to keep me on track for building my business and
• connect with inspiring, impact driven people around the world and in my city.

Firstly, I know I’m an ‘obliger’ according to Gretchen Ruben’s 4 Tendencies quiz. This means I’m the kind of person who wont keep a promise to myself, but I WILL keep a promise to you, or I’ll damn well do my best.

This always felt like a bug in my system honestly, until I realised I can essentially make promises to myself in public, so the world can see them which inspires the same feeling!

Don’t get me wrong, I know nobody gives a rat butt about my public declarations on Instagram (everyone’s too busy looking for dopamine or validation).

But the feeling is still there! The feeling of wanting to fulfil my promise to someone – to you! – still drives me to take action and get shit done.

In the never ending attempt to transform, a handful of experiments really changed things for me.

Next I’ll outline exactly what I did, how it impacted me and how you can do the same if you want.

Treated Instagram reels as a soapbox to share mental health advice.

For thirty days in a row I made a new video every day.

This almost broke me.

It didn’t help that I was also doing a few hundred push ups every day as a fundraiser for suicide prevention.

We raised $3,000!

Snapshot from my personal Instagram page. ☝🏽

Exhaustion shows up loud and clear on me.

My left eyelid droops almost like it isn’t working anymore, basically every single video it looks that way. Because I promised the internet I was going to do it, I just figured out the rest.

This massively stretched my belief barriers for overcoming and learning that I’m WAY more capable than I thought I was.

It stretched me to the limit. 30 days of physical, mental and emotional exercise. Even just time management.

To be honest, I took 3 weeks to recover after because I was so flat and exhausted, but was it worth it? Absolutely.

After doing the experiment I wrote a short report about the whole thing over on Quantified Self, which brings me to the next part…

Learned N-of-1 empowerment with help from the incredible community at Quantified Self.

There’s a special place in my heart for this group of empowering nerds.

If you’re like me, you love systems and experiments, but you don’t know how on earth to actually DO that stuff because you’re not really sure how to design a good experiment or track it properly.

Well, enter Quantified Self, a community of people who are all united in their single interest of quantifying their own self discovery journey!

They’ve baked together a very simple and easy to follow guide for anyone who wants to learn how to ask smart questions, design good metrics and tracking systems to quantify answers for self experiments.

These experiments come from a paradigm called citizen science.

Who could better experiment on your own health than you? Nobody has access to as much data as you. Your sleep routines, your eating habits, your posture, your relationships, your mood.

And yet somehow you have fallen into the trap of expecting outside experts to tell you what’s best for you, advocate for your needs, make recommendations that are just right for you specifically.

More often than not though the advice doesn’t quite fit because you’re not the right size / shape / genetic profile / social class / gender / race / whatever. So you’re wondering whether your health will ever improve.

That’s why N-of-1 experiments are SO exciting. Because they’re giving you the opportunity to learn in absolute detail what things work for you, what things don’t. The community is packed with helpful people. Happy to show you around, help you settle in to your experiments or offer what support, advice or even resources they have.

Through their help I designed and conducted a rough experiment of my own, check it out.

I outlined what I wanted to achieve, how I wanted to achieve it, then I went ahead and kept a log while doing so.

I snuck in the cross purpose of learning YouTube while I did this too! So because of going ahead and making this experiment I also learned about thumbnails and text size of images and lots of other little things.

Check it out if you wanna see the YouTube experiment lmao.

Lowkey it is pretty gross, FYI.

As you can see, these ‘sprints’ where I committed to doing something for a period of time really gave me a lot of fuel to break my own belief barriers.

The value of experimenting on social media isn’t really the outcome it generates, but who I become by putting myself out there.

I have to overcome all those fears, doubts and uncertainties.

Like, videos of my dandruff? In public?

It was a lot! And to be fair, I ran QUITE a few experiments like this long before I was ever public about them. I have a whole graveyard of private experiments I conducted that tracked, recorded and measured things which never made it to public view, because I wasn’t ready for that at the time.

This is a normal part of achieving anything. Don’t look at someone’s achievements and compare yourself to them.

Don’t begrudge the beginning because you see someone at the end!

Using N-of-1 as a tool for tracking self-therapy and trauma healing.

I have trauma.

Buckets loads.

A huge part of my healing comes from curiosity, always looking for answers, always tinkering in my subconscious trying to figure myself out.

So that’s why James W. Pennebaker’s book on journaling to heal trauma appealed to me so damn much!

I’ve read it, designed an experiment and you can have a peek here if you’d like.

Used Instagram stories as a long term accountability partner.

If you can’t tell, I love systems.

You can think of a system as a bunch of things connected to and affecting each other. It might be people in your house making a ‘family system’ where mum and dad bring home money and stress. The kids bring home gonorrhoea and laughter. The dog brings home dead birds and carpet cleaning bills, together everyone does their part.

Using social media for crappy things like mental masturbation, dopamine chasing or jerking off led to misery.

I cultivated the question in my heart: If there were a good way to ‘be’ so I didn’t feel so rotten, what would that look like?

Social media would be a place I felt seen, not invisible. A place I felt accountable, not unaccountable.

So I built a system!

It’s an experiment in public accountability, basically how to tell the internet what you want to do in order to follow through and actually do it.

Here’s a simple explainer.

It’s called The Chain Of Intent.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Said Bouziane (@saidboujeeane)

The first time I did it, I would post a story every single day on Instagram.

I made it a visible, tactile thing by using marbles, like recommended in Atomic Habits by James Clear.

@saidwithcourage

first thirty days of treating my socials as an accountability partner, legit changed my life.

♬ A sadly emo-like acoustic guitar trap beat(1174585) – PHONON

The Chain Of Intent system was quite simple.

Each day I did the thing I promised, I’d write a ‘+1’ on my story, or a ‘-1’ for the days I didn’t do it.

I’d add the numbers together so that over time I got to see how high my number climbed. By counting the days of the experiment and also counting the + or – number each day, I got to see how well I was keeping up a ‘chain of intent’.

One day I’ll probably make a free 7 day email course so you can set up a Chain of Intent system for yourself. If that’s something you would dig, let me know.

Legit over socials or email or in the comments on this blog, I’m always around, always down to connect.

Which is also the whole point, of, you know… Life.

I reach out to and connect with people!

I’ve made friends and acquaintances around the world.

People I never would have had the chance to meet in real life, but the internet has this crazy way of shrinking distances.

I’ve reached out to people who are titans of their industry, in regenerative agriculture for example, water cycles, complexity theory and systems building.

Literally just because I watched a Ted talk and thought, ‘I wonder if that guy would reply on LinkedIn’.

Turns out, yes, many of them do!

And it’s the same thing for the people in my friends list.

I often touch base with hundreds of people through social media. No longer feeling that pressure of having to reply, having turned off literally all notifications (yes, literally all notifications of all apps except my phone number).

You might think it’s weird that I reach out to all the random friends and followers I have all over the place, to say hi, wish them well or pay them a compliment or tell them whatever lovely way they’ve made me feel, I think it’s weird not to…

If we’re not connecting with people, our only real online connection is through this false experience of ‘engagement’ where the algorithm feeds us what it knows will keep our attention and we add to vanity metrics.

The person on the other end has this little dopamine squirting experience of false validation and off we all chop to the next weird ride in this digital carnival madhouse.

Earlier I wrote about ‘attachment’. Like the cringe feeling of getting left on read.

Here’s a photo of voicemails I I sent to people I didn’t hear back from.

If people don’t get back, that’s totally ok.

Why? Because I couldn’t photograph all the conversations where people did reply, as many of those conversations are still going.

I don’t drink alcohol any more, so I tend to wake up on boxing day (the day after Christmas for you folks overseas) feeling just about as fresh and ready for life as any other day.

Why not take an hour and send random voice messages to everyone in my contact list?

Social media is a horrendous slave-master. But if treated properly by being responsible with attention, it can stir up countless connections, discussions and moments of magic.

It’s all possible only because of putting on my seatbelt.

So how exactly do I put my seatbelt on to drive Social Media?

Here’s a few keys I stick to in no particular order.

• Anything that stirs feelings I want to minimise, I turn the volume down.
  • Yes, I mute a LOT of my friends and family.
• I tolerate no hate-bait, no matter what.
  • I’m interested in what empowers me toward positive action, building not tearing down.
• All notifications are off on all apps all the time.
  • No need for it.
• Zero pressure to reply or get back to people.
  • I know I’m busy, other people don’t. It’s my responsibility to manage relationship expectations with grace.
• Comparison is inspiration without empowerment.
  • If it doesn’t inspire me or stir me to action, either I remove it or remove myself from it.
• Regular periods of zero scolling.
  • Super healthy to do this regularly – just aim for absolute zero and stew in the discomfort of your own presence.

The real (personal) reason I’m putting this out there.

You’ve read this far so I doubt I’m addressing a skeptic at this point.

They’ve probably left to go dive bomb someone in a comment section.

Now that it’s just you and I, let me come clean about something.

A couple years ago I reached out to someone I’ve wanted to talk to for years. You know that niggling feeling you get like at the back of your mind? Where your heart kinda whispers, ‘hey, I wonder how so-and-so is doing…’

Well I finally listened to the feeling and reached out to my friend, let’s call them Twisty.

The last time we spoke was in 2018. We connected deeply over heartbreak, obscure goth music and basically being depressed misunderstood weirdo teenagers except now in the bodies of adults.

I’d had that feeling to reach out so many times over the years.

I found them and wrote them a message on Messenger and before shooting it into the digital void went to check their profile.

Surprise, turns out they’re dead.

They died a few years ago.

Reading between the lines on their page, the beautiful heartfelt messages left by their friends and family, the other stuff they posted before they passed, I can’t help but wonder whether it was suicide.

Cue three hours of uncontrollable tears.

I had a deep love for Twisty.

For their funky perspective, light sense of humour around extremely dark topics. They showed up in full high def if you know what I mean.

They lived in technicolour.

And in their mid-thirties they passed away in a total surprise.

It’s stirring me up a little just writing this.

So that did it, I swore I would listen to that feeling after that. Even if only to say g’day, let people know I see them there and they’re on my mind. Of course it’s a big network with many thousands across all the platforms etc, so it’s something I have very low self-expectations around.

Just chip away at connecting, same as this whole online writing thing.

The point is to control the controllable.

I can’t control whether I get left on read, left on unread, or even whether they’re still alive.

But I can control how I drive this insanely powerful engine called social media.

To connect with people like Twisty, or with people like you. People with the same squishy warm heart and humour and darkness and hopes and fears like all of us.

To find people who’d like to toil in the garden with me and do something meaningful with our time on earth.

To find people who may even get an invite to the bedroom of my heart, if they’ve proven they are safe and trustworthy.

To inspire someone out there to wake up out of the dopamine coma and connect with someone.

You never know when it might be your last chance.