Imagining deleting social media and KakaoTalk
Feeling the inflammation of social media that I truly loved
Burnout came after I worked out of a sense of duty
Focusing on yoga practice to overcome it and recover physical health

I have a bold dream. I want to delete all social media and KakaoTalk and spend a year focusing solely on my life.

This dream seems impossible for me, who teaches students about social media at university, writes about social media, and works as a creator.

I truly loved social media. But as the saying goes, excessive love is poison. I filmed 3,040 videos a day, uploaded 34 videos a day, and lived for several years, and then burnout came.

In a state of burnout, I experienced the irony of "loving something too much that I started hating it." I still feel like I love it and want to love it, but I feel miserable because I can't love it anymore.

I looked back on my mistakes. First, I shouldn't have done it that much. When someone asks me about my burnout, I say, "It's like my leg is broken." I shouldn't have run until my leg broke. After my leg breaks, I can't run anymore. All I can do is wait for my leg to heal and focus on recovery. I should have known my limits. I regret it.

Second, I shouldn't have made numbers my goal. I always had goals. And most of them were about "numbers." Getting over 1 million subscribers, getting over 1 million views, etc. I wrote down my weekly goals and erased them after achieving them. It was like a game, and I analyzed and pondered how to level up the game and complete the quest.

In the process, I lost the pure fun of making content. Once I reached the numbers I had set as my goal, I lost motivation. I felt empty about why I had to do this and what meaning it had anymore. If my goal had been "to consistently create content that makes people happy," and the definition of success as a creator had been "to create content that I love forever," wouldn't I be making content happily even now?

I confess that it was "greed" that brought "fire." I am paying the price, taking responsibility for it.

I still love social media so much. I enjoy analyzing memes and trends, and I enjoy teaching students about the grammar of social media. That's why it's ironic. I like it, but I hate to see it. There's an English expression for it, "love hate relationship."

Thinking back, I think it was the same when I was doing idol activities. I started singing because I loved music so much, but after several years of working too hard, singing became "work," so I hated singing. I started to love singing again when I became a creator. Once I had a healthy distance from singing, I loved singing again.

Someone told me, "I think you shouldn't make what you really like your job. You'll hate it then. You should keep what you really like as a hobby." I didn't agree with that when I first heard it. But now I understand to some extent. When everything becomes work, a moment comes when you have to do it out of a "sense of duty" even when you hate it, and then the moment comes when you hate work because of it.

Still, I think people should do what they really love. Of course, there may be times when it becomes work and you hate it, but I think that in the end, you learn how to find "balance" through trial and error and regain love.

The most basic thing I did to overcome burnout was to eat and sleep well. Many people think burnout is a problem of the "mind," but it's actually closer to a problem of the "body." When you face work, it's not a mental reaction, but a "physical reaction." When I try to work, I get brain fog symptoms, feel nauseous like I'm going to vomit, or have physical reactions. So, along with the mind, you have to pay attention to your body's recovery.

So, I chose yoga, which trains the body and mind together. Yoga was recommended to me by a creator who had experienced and overcome burnout. She told me that she had overcome burnout through yoga during extreme burnout, and she advised me to eat well, sleep well, and exercise. I actually felt my body recovering little by little as I practiced yoga.

Other things I'm doing to overcome burnout are figuring out my limits and setting boundaries. When my body signals that it's tired, I stop without pushing myself. I'm practicing stopping even if I want to do more. At first, I felt anxious that I would fall behind. But now I know that this process is necessary to go far, so I stop.

One thing I'm working on lately is expressing new content on a new platform. The new platform I've chosen is Thread and Brunch. The new content is "love and marriage" stories.

I know what will attract the attention of more people and get "likes" and which platforms are the hottest, but if I keep chasing trends like that, I could lose myself again, so I'm regaining my love for content by doing what I really want to do.

I know better than anyone that Reels, Shorts, and TikTok, the era of short-form content, are an opportunity, but in the past five years, I used up all the energy I should be using now. I'm the one who says that preemption is important, but I realize belatedly that running with all my might first wasn't always a good thing.

To truly overcome burnout 100%, I think I need to have that "time to delete all social media and KakaoTalk and focus solely on my life for a year" that I talked about earlier. But no matter how much I think about it, it's too bold, so I'm choosing to recover slowly but surely.

I dream of overcoming the "love hate relationship" between social media and me and having a relationship filled with love again.

※ The writer of this article is me, and an article contributed to Woman Economy Newshas been copied.