Chocolate cinnamon cappuccino.  Honey fig pecan.  Apricot gingerbread.

I’m experimenting in the cafe kitchen the day after the surgeon general’s warning is released, proclaiming that social media may harm children and adolescents.

The counters are scattered with the different add-in ingredients: cinnamon chocolate filling, diced figs infusing in milk, minced apricots and chopped candied ginger.  I’ve developed one muffin recipe that I think is a good foundation to work with.  Then I tweak it based on the muffin flavor I’m envisioning.  I swap out honey for sugar with the fig pecan.  Swap out molasses for honey in the apricot gingerbread.

Last year, I boldly declared that 2022 was the year of the muffin.  I began the experiments then: cranberry orange nut, cinnamon streusel, raspberry lemon…Now I can’t seem to let it go.  I am forever on a quest to develop the next great muffin.

In 2022 I also developed a fascination with the 9 by 12 pan.  Each week during the season, I experimented with a new dessert that could be prepared in the classic baking pan.  This year, I find myself scanning cookbooks and websites for more new recipe ideas.  

As I mix and scoop the muffin batter, the music hums in the background. Saoirse works on her computer out front, singing along.  I’m smiling to myself.

For years, I was too tired to try new things.  Suddenly, I can’t stop playing in the kitchen to expand my culinary repertoire

Something has shifted inside of me. 

I think the Surgeon General’s warning has something to do with it.  

When I published Radical Homemakers in 2010, friends came to me and told me that I absolutely had to create social media accounts.  I got a Twitter account.  I got a Facebook account.   Daily I sat at my computer (I didn’t have an iphone yet) and attempted to come up with quippy salient messages that would earn me circulations, likes, and follows.  

It wasn’t enough to promote myself as a writer.  Next, I had to create farm accounts and post to those, as well.  

Then the cafe opened, and the social media push was really  on.  Each week, I devoted a morning to developing campaigns and planning out posts.  We bought tripods and mics and lighting.  One corner of the cafe kitchen grew cluttered with all the equipment.  We got an Instagram account, and I read books on how to do reels (yes  I had to read a book about it), and we worked to develop one minute videos.  Bob and I created a YouTube channel and expanded to create 15 and 20 minute videos, demonstrating how to cook the various recipes we were preparing in the cafe.

I wrote the next book proposal, and those followers we gained on social media became a currency.  Their presence (or absence) was considered an indicator for whether or not I had the following behind me to guarantee sales.  I stopped knitting in the evenings, because I couldn’t hold onto the needles long enough to get any stitches done before I picked up my phone to respond to a comment on one of the platforms, or to create a new post, or look at other posts.

And oh.  Those other posts.  Every other farmer and cafe owner, all more clever, more quippy, and infinitely more visually attractive than me.  Every book author had more followers, more engagement.  Each time I picked up my phone, I was reminded of my shortcomings.

I’m a lifelong avid reader, but I noticed my reading habits changed.  Suddenly the hours I could spend lost in a book dwindled to less than five minutes.  I could hardly get through a  paragraph before I found myself scrolling through social media on my phone.  I was on a perpetual quest to show the farm, the cafe, and myself as a writer in the best possible light.  

And then my Facebook account got hacked and shut down in January of 2022.  The Instagram account hung by a tenuous thread, because of it’s link to the Facebook account.

So did our bank accounts and credit cards.

What a wretched mess that was. 

With one little whoosh from a hacker in Hanoi, I was swept into cyber oblivion, and faced with the challenge of trying to re-secure all the bank accounts and reclaim my identity. 

I should have been an emotional wreck.  Instead, I was gob-smacked by the overwhelming sense of peace.  No more scrolling.  No posts to generate.  

Bob and I began to fantasize about going forward with our business without ever returning to it.

We worked at coming up with better marketing schemes in an effort to compensate.  We re-constructed the mailing list that mom built up twenty years ago.  We had the kids draw post cards and created mailers.  The blog, podcast and our digital newsletter became our only digital presence.  

Those were the simple conscious changes we made.  And contrary to what we thought would happen, the farm did not take a financial hit.  We saw a five percent increase in sales, even as we gave ourselves extra time off to navigate Bob’s cancer treatments.   

And as I sit here, in a cafe kitchen filled with muffin ingredients, mulling over the Surgeon General’s warning, I wonder if the same warning might apply to farmers and small business owners.  Some claim to be successful using social media as a marketing technique.  But now, in hindsight, it all added up to a lot of wasted hours and unnecessary anxiety for me.  Perhaps this is owing to my introversion.  Maybe the push for social media performance was just too taxing on my personality type.  But just because I don’t enjoy performing on camera and putting myself out there does’t mean I shouldn’t have a successful family business.

The chocolate cinnamon cappuccino muffins come out of the oven first.  Saoirse begins circling for the first sample.  And I consider that tiny bump in sales from 2021 to 2022.  This year to date, the increase is greater still.  

Yet, why do I feel like I’m working a whole lot less?  I think it’s because I’m not stopping every second to take a picture of my muffin batter, or the diced apricots next to the candied ginger.  I’m not trying to shoot little food porn reels of stirring, whisking, or sprinkling the streusel topping.  I’m not putting out informational videos about how to develop a muffin recipe.

Nor am I worrying about whether someone else is making better muffins.  Or creating nicer muffin movies.

I’m just in my kitchen, doing what I love, fully present with the experience.

I’m not creating content. 

I’m creating from my heart.  

And I am in a state of flow, fixated on texture and flavor.

More to the point, I notice that I’m not tired.  I’m not anxious.  I’m not worried about the passage of time.  

Rather than trying to convey my experience to the world, I’m settling into the depth of the experience for myself.

That doesn’t generate likes.  That doesn’t generate followers.  But it somehow is coming through in the business.  

A space has opened up in my heart to fall in love with my work and my life anew.  I’m doing more than inventing muffin recipes.  I’ve gone from requiring a couple months to read a single book to reading a couple books in a single month  I’m finding time to work more on my own writing.  The time I would have spent scheduling social media posts goes to practicing baritone saxophone.  I’m knitting my dog a sweater.  

Bob and Ula make their way from the farm down to the cafe as the last two muffin batches come out of the oven.  They’re all circling now, ready to recipe test…Loving this moment, celebrating the flavor of something new.  No cameras emerge to capture the event.  No posts announce it to the world.  It’s just us, doing our thing.   

The pleasures of life — whether it’s the work of the business, the connection with family and friends, the joy of a hobby or my passion to write — are more present than ever with the pressure to perform for social media removed. Yes, we’ve sacrificed digital popularity  But we’ve traded up for real life staying power.  And when it comes to keeping a business going and staying healthy enough to enjoy it, that’s a real long-term gain. I wish the surgeon general would add that to his report. 

Did you enjoy this?

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And that’s a really important thing to do, because all of this— the podcast, the blog, the novels and books and the creative recharging that happens over fall and winter—   are a result of the support of my patrons on Patreon.  And this week I’d like to send a shout out to my patrons K. Johnson and Justine Buchanan.  Thank you, folks!  I couldn’t do it without you!