The Dark Side Of Internet Fame

This blog is in no way mean to brag or place value on the number of social media followers you have. It’s to openly address the unspoken negatives that accompany this type of growth.

In the past 8 months, I’ve gained about 42,000 Twitter followers. I wouldn’t consider myself Internet famous, but I have had substantial growth in a short amount of time. (If you’d like to see a breakdown of my analytics, check out my previous blog post).

It’s always the dream to become Internet famous; there are so many benefits! You get invited to attend conferences and events, people engage with your blog posts, you get invited as a guest on podcasts. Life is great.

Except…there is also a dark side, and we don’t often discuss it.

Phone Obsession

One of the quickest-appearing symptoms of my growth was the amount of time I spent glued to my phone. Before becoming active on Twitter, I spent maybe an hour using my phone each day. After my follower count started rising, so did my active phone usage.

I went from spending about an hour each day on my phone, to upwards of five hours. It became a full-time job. I ended up disabling all notifications because I couldn’t focus.

I was addicted.