Social Making. Not Social Media.

Social media is a tired circus act that continues to lure the public with free admission and overpriced snacks.

And between the clowns and freaks — it's not hard to figure out why we scroll.

Like so many other early internet ideas that persist today, it all originally sounded more than consummate.

But this newfound conductor swiftly morphed into high school hellscape meets 21st century technology.

Now to be fair, it's not all bad.

There's the colorful language, comic relief, and cute pet videos that offer us consumers a moment of escape from our ever-busying lives.

But at what cost?

If the objective of early social media was to connect people then we can expectantly claim victory as the world is more interconnected than it's ever been. But it seems that Zuckerberg may have had a slightly different motive for birthing Facebook. According to an early interview he wanted to

"create an environment that could help college students connect with one another."

But Zuckerberg wasn't trying to join a tennis club or seeking afterhours tutoring or even looking for more friends. He wanted to build and was searching for others who wanted to do the same.

It's quite possible that what Mark really wanted to create was an environment where ambitious college students like himself could talk shop and share ideas.

And it's also plausible that just like many noble business ventures, his was corrupted by a toxic thirst for greed and the addictive nature of power.

Facebook and other platforms alike feast on our inherent fears, primal anxieties, and novel attention disorders as they vigorously compete in the race to patent our evolutionary design.

But enough doom and gloom. What can we do about it?

For starters, we can pursue social media's original goal of connecting builders.

And more than that, we can use it to actually build something.

If we can't stop consuming the wrong things via doom scrolling, maybe we can start to balance that diet by working off some of the excess through building.

What won't matter at the end of  your life:

•  How much money you made

• The # of arguments you won

• How much news you consumed

What will matter at the end of your life:

• What you built

• Who you helped

• How you spent your time

Let's start using social media the way it was originally intended.

Let's build.

This is how we help ordinary people create extraordinary products.