On May 3, 2025, I deleted all my social media accounts.*
(I’ve also been entirely avoiding reading all news.)
It’s now been a month! So here are my results…
The Good
1 – Within just a few days, I got THREE projects moving forward:
The New Carl King Album
For those that don’t know, I’m recording a new album.
One part of the album is going to be very “Sir Millard Mulch” — a dozen or so silly lyric songs with some complex twists. Last week, I sent four of those to Travis Orbin. He quickly transcribed them and is ready to rehearse and record them, once I approve his demos.
The other part will be a complicated instrumental suite in 3 parts. Just today, I finished composing the first of those three. It’s 7 minutes long, and you can hear the piano sketch demo inside Patreon. Satisfying!
I hope to finish and release the new album by the time I turn 50 in August. (Hope in one hand, poop in the other.)
So, You’re A Creative Genius… Now What? (Second Edition Book)
The book I published in 2010 is finally coming back.
I hired my friend, Chris Higgins, to do a quick copy edit, calling out factual inaccuracies or outdated ideas. That part of the work is done!
And Lance Myers finished the new cover design! For now, only Patreon members can see it. I’ve shared several sketches throughout the process, as we zeroed in on it.
For this second edition, I’m writing a Severe Disclaimer Preface and a 2025 Commentary section. The photo at the top of this blog post is from a friend’s cabin, where I sat and worked on that.
Once it’s ready, the book will be available everywhere: Kindle, PDF, print-on-demand, etc.
Morgan Agren’s Conundrum (4K Documentary Remaster)
In 2013, I released a documentary about one of my favorite drummers.
I also hired… yep, Chris Higgins (the same one, coincidentally) to convert the framerate (it was shot in an embarrassing 30 fps) and upscale the whole film to 4K. After that, I’ll redo all the color correction, since my skills in that department have improved in 12 years.
There will also be brand new cover art (also by Lance Myers), which we’ll get to work on soon.
No scheduled release date for that, but sometime this summer.
The Okay
Not feeling “fake connected” through Instagram caused me to go out more with real-life friends and my vegan activity group. It’s not been amazing, but it’s a decent change?
Being off social media, I have no idea what lots of people/creators are up to. For instance, as I type this, I don’t know what Steve Vai has been doing all month. So I’ll need to manually look that stuff up, like in the old days. But it creates a little bit of forced scarcity, which can be good.
The Bad
With the extra time, I expected to do more activities I value, like reading and exercising.
Instead, I replaced my waste-of-time social media usage with other waste-of-time behaviors, specifically playing video games (Baldur’s Gate on PS5) and swiping left on dating apps.
Living alone, I simply have too much free time and not enough structure to my days. It’s too easy to fall into bad habits as months slip by.
That means I’ll need to be more disciplined with my time. Gotta get back to some healthy amount of Cal-Newport-style time-blocking — even though I don’t like to be strict with that stuff on an hourly level.
Summary
To be honest, on a day-to-day basis, I don’t feel like anything has changed. I don’t miss looking at Instagram. At all. I rarely remember it exists.
But I’m pleased that three of my major creative projects that were STUCK FOR YEARS are now moving again. That’s evidence of something. But there’s definitely some room for more improvement in my productivity.
Luckily, summer has returned, and I can get out there and walk around wearing my GoRuck backpack and ride my dang bike in the sun. That always helps.
*People have said, “But Carl, blogs and Patreon are social media.”
Fair enough. Social media isn’t the most accurate term, but it’s the easiest to use. I could define social media as a computer program that:
1 – encourages us to upload as much disposable (on a daily, even hourly, even minutely scale) content as possible, which is ranked and fed to a small portion of followers by a judgmental AI
2 – exploits our need for attention and social connection
3 – exaggerates social hierarchy & the attachment to a digital persona/ego
4 – is designed to keep us scrolling on it forever with intermittent reinforcement like a slot machine
5 – While most importantly, making billions of dollars from ads.
(I am of course referring to Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, etc.)
That’s certainly different from an old-fashioned blog or Patreon account, where there are only static creations for a small & specific audience… and no infinite, addictive, manipulative, algorithmic feed.