Hey friends! Hope you’re having a good day so far, wherever you are.

Since the last update, I’ve watched most of the Christmas movies I wanted to watch (Bad Santa, Home Alone, Elf, Christmas Vacation, and Die Hard), installed a new GPU in my gaming PC (an open box RTX 2060 that I got from Best Buy for $250), and spent a little too much time thinking about social media.

I wrote a couple of pages about social media and after some internal debate, I’ve decided to share it in this update, just because I wanted these updates to include the real shit I’m living in real time. I love writing polished articles too, but there’s something about just dumping thoughts on a page and doing minimal editing that has always appealed to me. So here you go.

Thoughts on Social Media

Right now, I’m struggling with feeling motivated to spend any energy on personal social media. The core of why I’m not motivated is that I’m not convinced the value generated is worth the time and energy invested. There’s a lot to unpack there but I’ll save that for another time.

The key questions I’m thinking about are:

Q: How do I best use these platforms to reach people and drive attention to things I think are worthy of attention?

A: TBD

Q: How do I reach people and get their attention off of the digital platforms? (What are real life methods for connecting with people and building community and fandoms, in other words.)

A: TBD

Q. What should I be spending time on instead of social media?

A: TBD

Q: What are the outcomes I want to get from social media?

A: Connect with interesting, inspiring people who are doing cool work. Get more work opportunities (playing drums, building companies, traveling, teaching, working on podcasts, helping bands, producing video).

Q: What turns me off about social media?

A: The focus on creating mindless entertainment for views / engagement. I’m not a fan of algorithmic feeds (that’s ok! Don’t use them). The focus of the companies on getting people addicted to using their platform with dopamine hits, date mining, surveillance capitalism, and profiting off of controversial content / ragebait.

Q: How do I want to use these platforms, and what are some rules I should follow?

A: Create stuff that meaningful to me to share with other people. Tell compelling stories. Sharing things I create. Highlight stuff I think is great. Create meaningful videos. Learn in public.

Q: How much time should I be spending on social media every week?

If I treat it as a necessary part of my job, how much time and attention am I willing to invest?

Let’s say 5 hours a week. What does that look like in practice? • 3 hours producing content • 1 hour posting / updating • 1 hour replying

Something I need to remember: I don’t have to keep coming up with new content every time I need to post something. You can stretch out the content calendar by reposting stuff older than 6 months.

Q: What kind of content resonates with me? What do I want to make and share?

I think this is the core question. A lack of clarity on the answer to this question makes everything so much harder to execute on. If I get clear on what I want to make, how I’m going to make it, and how long it’s going to take, the actual execution will be much less tiring or frustrating.

A: Tutorials—What’s something you do that you are familiar now, but used to be hard? Write a How-To guide. Make a video explaining it. Expect to spend 4-8 hours for an evergreen video that you can repost every 6 months.

A: Live performances—Mix a show, sync to drum cam. Pull 5-10 short clips of the best parts of songs. Add captions, do coloring. Expect to spend 4 hours for 2 months of content.

A: Practice videos—Make a playlist of songs you like to play along with. Record into a Logic Project with the song and a short section of your drums. Mix and sync audio to video in Final Cut. Batch this once a week. Do 5-10 songs. Expect to spend 4-8 hours for 2 months of content.

A: Great photography—As you take photos, group the best ones into collections. Write a short story to go with each.

Recap

Writing this out has helped me get some clarity on the topic of social media. Since I do think it’s one of the tools I need to use and master to progress my career and grow an audience for my band (and people I’m working with), it’s worth treating as a skill to develop and something I do for work, even when I’m not in the mood. But I also want to be careful to avoid falling into the time consuming traps that are presented by these platforms—endless feeds and mindless entertainment.

That’s all for this week. I hope you have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Aaron Dowd

Sunday, December 21, 2025

Fort Worth, TX