At some point, social media starts to feel… wrong. Not confusing. Not even overwhelming necessarily. Just wrong in a way that’s hard to explain without sounding dramatic.

You open the app out of habit. You scroll for a few seconds. And something in your body tightens. Your jaw clenches. Your shoulders rise. You feel the faint urge to scroll faster, like you want to get past whatever this is before it touches you.

It’s not that you don’t understand what’s happening.

You understand perfectly well that you’re being marketed to. That everyone is performing to appear relevant. That attention is the currency and urgency is the tactic. You’ve been in business long enough to recognize the mechanics at play.

What you can’t tolerate is how it feels to participate.

The forced intimacy. The manufactured enthusiasm. The sense that you’re supposed to flatten yourself into something more palatable, more visible, more consumable – and do it cheerfully.

When people tell me they “should” be more active on social media but just aren’t interested, this is what they mean.

Not that they don’t know what to post. But that every instinct in their body resists the environment itself.

When Relevance Becomes a Moving Target

If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you’ve seen this before.

Same game. Different platform.

Even in a pre-internet world, there was always a sense that staying relevant meant staying adaptable. New jargon to learn. New expectations to meet. New standards ushered in to replace “outdated” ones.

And you adjusted because that was the cost of staying in the room.

That pressure hasn’t changed – but the proximity has.

It lives closer to your body now. Your smartphone is never out of reach. Closer to your face. Closer to the way you’re expected to present yourself to the world.

There’s always a new signal for what relevance should look like. A new format, a new tone, a new way of presenting yourself that implies whatever you were doing before is no longer enough.

You don’t usually encounter it as a direct instruction. You encounter it as implication.

Post this way. Show more of yourself. Loosen up. Speed up. Stay visible.

And underneath all of it is a message women have been absorbing for decades: keep up, or risk being overlooked.

Social media doesn’t just feel annoying. It feels loaded.

Because it takes a familiar pressure and turns the volume all the way up. Relevance becomes something you’re expected to perform publicly and continuously, with metrics attached. Likes. Reach. Engagement. Proof that you’re still current. Still interesting. Still worth paying attention to.

Social media didn’t invent this dynamic.
It industrialized it.

For women who have already built careers, identities, and bodies of work, this is where the breaking point happens.

You’re not confused about what’s being asked of you. You can see the pattern clearly. You know how the game works.

What’s intolerable is how relentless it is.

The constant requirement to stay pliable. To keep adjusting your edges. To keep auditioning for relevance instead of standing in what you already know how to do well.

At a certain point, that doesn’t feel ambitious or adaptive.

It feels like erosion.

The Problem Isn’t the Platform

You’re caught between two instincts that don’t agree with each other.

On one hand, you recognize the pattern. You’ve been here before. You know what it looks like when a system rewards adaptability, visibility, and compliance. You learned early how to read the room, how to adjust your edges, how to stay relevant enough to keep moving forward.

Those reflexes are still there. They don’t disappear just because you’ve outgrown the game.

But on the other hand, this landscape is genuinely unfamiliar. The pace is faster. The exposure is constant. The pressure isn’t just professional – it’s personal. And the version of you that knows how to survive these systems is no longer the version you want to lead from.

So you’re left in an uncomfortable middle space.

You know how to play. You just don’t want to anymore.

And that doesn’t feel brave or liberating at first. It feels risky. Because opting out – even partially – raises a real question:

What happens to my business if I don’t keep up?

That’s the tension most people skip past too quickly.

Not “I hate social media” or “I don’t want to perform.”

But: I know exactly what this system is asking of me – and I’m no longer sure I’m willing to pay the price.

For some people, that turns into avoidance dressed up as strategy – closing the apps, looking for workarounds, searching for proof that successful businesses don’t really need to be there anyway.

Sometimes that’s true.

But it misses the point. Because the problem was never visibility itself. It was the version of visibility you were being asked to participate in.

What Actually Changes

There are people who stay visible without living inside the feed.

You’ve seen them, even if you haven’t analyzed what they’re doing.

(And if you haven’t because you’ve been avoiding the scroll lately, trust me. They’re there.)

They’re not louder. They’re not more exposed. They’re not trying to win the platform. And somehow, they still feel present.

They have a steadiness to them that doesn’t spike and vanish. When you come across them, you don’t get the sense you’re catching them mid-performance. You get the sense there’s an actual human being with a real body of work behind what you’re seeing, and the social content is simply the surface of something that exists elsewhere.

That’s the first tell that something is different here: The center of gravity isn’t social.

It’s a place you can return to.

A site that reads like a real business, not a hallway of opt-ins. A page that explains what they do without turning it into a personality. A newsletter that doesn’t sound like it was written to “engage,” but to say something true. A point of view that doesn’t change every time the algorithm gets restless.

Their visibility doesn’t depend on constant output because it isn’t built on constant output. It’s built on something already made.

That’s the part most people skip, because it’s less glamorous than posting.

When you’re trapped in relevance pressure, you’re working as if social media is the primary location of your credibility. Which means everything has to be proved in public, in real time, in whatever format the platform is currently rewarding.

When you step out of that, the work reorganizes.

Social media becomes a door, not a room.

It’s not where you hold your expertise. It’s where you point to it.

It’s not where you compress yourself for attention. It’s where you leave a trail that leads somewhere solid.

That may sound obvious, but it’s a different job than most people are doing online.

It’s not about finding a more comfortable way to post. It’s about building the kind of presence that can tolerate quiet weeks, mood swings, caregiving seasons, real life – without your business feeling like it’s at risk the minute your output dips.

Not because you’ve opted out of visibility.

Because you’ve stopped outsourcing your legitimacy to a platform that profits from keeping you slightly panicked.

The Real Question

When you want your business to grow, visibility isn’t optional. You’re not really asking if you need to show up, or even how you show up.

The real question is what defines your terms in the first place.

If those terms are based purely on your preference, they won’t hold for very long. Running a business means doing things you wouldn’t choose in a vacuum. You prepare for a client meeting. You think about the experience on the other side of the interaction. You make decisions based on what helps the work land well, not just what feels easiest in the moment.

Your terms around showing up online get defined the same way:

They come from what makes a difference for the people you want to serve.

Once you orient from there, the focus shifts away from posting altogether. The question becomes what actually needs to exist.

What kind of work reflects how you think. What kind of material gives your ideas enough space to hold their shape. What someone would need to encounter in order to decide – without urgency, without pressure – that you’re the right person for them.

That’s not content for a feed.
It’s a body of work.

You build that. Keep building it because it’s what serves your people. Let it say what can’t be reduced to a caption or explained in fragments.

It becomes the room your business lives in, whether that’s writing, teaching, resources, or something else entirely.

And now social media makes sense.

Not as the place where the work has to perform, but as the place that points toward it. A sign out front. A marker that says something real exists here, without trying to contain the whole thing.

That’s what it looks like when the work – rather than the platform – sets the conditions.

The Return of Self-Trust

There’s a difference between visibility that asks you to compress yourself and visibility that lets you stand where you already are. One drains you. The other steadies you.

That steadiness doesn’t come from doing less. It comes from doing fewer things that ask you to contort. Your effort goes into building your work – an article, a case study, an episode, a resource – not feeding an algorithm.

In the early stages of business, you’re building a foundation. Later, you’re deepening and expanding. Either way, you’re building something that’s based on coherence rather than reaction. 

And slowly, your confidence returns. Not as bravado, but as recognition.

This is mine.
This reflects how I think.
This holds up.

That kind of confidence doesn’t spike. It endures.

What Lasts Isn’t the Loudest Thing

Most platforms reward immediacy. What’s newest, fastest, most responsive gets surfaced. That creates the illusion that durability comes from constant motion.

But durability comes from shape.

From work that can be encountered out of order and still make sense. From ideas that don’t rely on urgency to feel relevant. From presence that doesn’t collapse the moment you stop pushing.

When someone encounters your work – really encounters it – they aren’t asking how often you post. They’re asking whether what you’ve built holds their attention long enough to trust it.

That’s not something you prove with consistency metrics.

It’s something you demonstrate by having something to stand on.

When the center holds – when the work is solid, coherent, and true to how you operate – visibility becomes supportive instead of extractive. Social media becomes one way people find you, not the place where you have to constantly justify your existence.

You don’t stop showing up.

You stop scrambling.

A Different Measure of Relevance

At some point, relevance stops being about staying current and becomes about staying intact.

About whether your work still sounds like you. Whether it still serves the people you care about serving. Whether you recognize yourself in what you’re putting into the world.

That’s a subtler measure, but it’s a truer one.

And it’s the measure that allows you to keep going – not just this quarter, not just this platform, but across the long arc of a business that’s meant to last.

You don’t earn that by keeping up.

You earn it by building something that doesn’t require you to disappear inside the process.

Once that exists, social media no longer carries the weight it once did.

It becomes a way people encounter the work, not the place where it has to prove itself.