Private Lives
Why not everything should be explained, captured, or known – a case of living without an audience
I used to believe that privacy was a kind of social gravity, an invisible force that grounded human interaction, requiring no defence, no justification, and certainly no curation. It simply was. A given. Like the expectation that people didn’t narrate their inner monologues at the dinner table or upload proof of their decency before morning coffee. It was the background fabric of adult life, like taxes, or the dull, inevitable ache in your lower back that signals you’ve crossed some unspectacular threshold into real age.
Then one afternoon, over tea that had already gone cold, I overheard a friend casually remark that she found people without any digital presence “a little off”. She said it while slicing a pear with disarming care, as if handling something dangerous. “It’s like they’re hiding something”, she added, not maliciously but with a kind of algorithmic certainty, the way one speaks after spending too long online and forgetting how to think without consensus. I almost replied, something smug and self-righteous like, maybe they’re just living, but I didn’t. I just nodded, watching the fruit curl on the plate like a metaphor she hadn’t earned, and realised that we had officially entered a cultural phase in which invisibility no longer signaled freedom or integrity, but threat.
Future archaeologists, assuming there are any, will require a particularly dry sense of humour to interpret our era without succumbing to ridicule. Imagine their confusion as they uncover digital ruins of a civilisation so estranged from its own interiority, so pathologically addicted to third-person narration, that it began live-streaming its breakdowns and packaging trauma as personal branding. Not because it lacked pain, but because it didn’t, and pain, we’ve decided, must now be socially endorsed to be considered real. Just ask the algorithm!
One of my closest friends once ended a three-year relationship and didn’t update her relationship status. Her ex, a man who spoke about authenticity as though it were a podcast subscription, accused her of “erasing the truth”. She wasn’t. She just didn’t want her heartbreak to be subject to the digital hunger for updates, commentary, and performative closure. She didn’t hide the pain, she refused to turn it into audience participation.
We speak of “connection” now as if it were a moral imperative, but more often than not, it functions as soft surveillance. Your morning espresso becomes a mood board. Your partner’s laugh is potential reel material. And grief, so long as it’s shot in soft lighting and accompanied by minimalist piano, can be monetised, one share at a time.
Is this exhibitionism? Not exactly. Not in the traditional, spotlight-begging sense. This is something stranger. More diffused. It is not performance for attention, it is existential outsourcing. A low-frequency desperation to feel real by being seen, liked, confirmed. The performative impulse has shifted from spectacle to atmosphere. It doesn’t shout. It hums. A kind of ontological tinnitus. So we post. And post. And somewhere along the way, the self, the actual one, becomes a blurred composite of audience feedback, trending audio, and brand-safe sentiment.
Algorithmic Intimacy and the Shrinking Wild
There was a time, not mythic, just pre-WiFi, when intimacy grew slowly, like moss on stone: quiet, unhurried, dependent on the conditions of light and time rather than visibility and scale. Love, back then, was not designed for consumption. It unfolded obliquely, between the lines, in gestures small enough to be missed if you weren’t paying close attention. A borrowed book annotated in pencil. A shared silence on a walk home. A hand that hovered before it touched. It required patience, ambiguity, and the unnerving possibility that the other person might not feel the same way, and that you might never know for sure. And that was, somehow, part of the thrill.
Now, intimacy arrives pre-processed. Cropped, captioned, filtered for mood. We no longer discover one another; we preview. People introduce themselves through carefully pruned bios and strategically timed stories, giving potential partners an aesthetic summary before the first word is exchanged. It’s less a relationship than a curated archive of appeal, an emotional LinkedIn with better lighting. The rituals have changed: we swipe instead of stumble; we photograph before we feel. And the wild, the ungoverned, unmediated wilderness of desire, has shrunk to the size of a screen.
I’ve heard about dates where the real conversation didn’t begin until after the photos were taken. As if the experience needed to be documented first to earn its reality. The evening becomes a sequence of aesthetic signifiers: a candle flickering beside a negroni, a blurry portrait in golden-hour light, the slow-motion clink of glasses. What happens after is irrelevant, as long as it looked like connection. Mystery, once the erotic substrate of becoming, is now treated as poor user design – too slow, too uncertain, too much friction for modern desire. We optimise for legibility. We value clarity over contradiction. We swipe left on complexity.
And we’ve begun to believe that privacy, at least in the romantic realm, is not just outdated, but suspect. Tell someone “I’d rather not share that”, and you risk being labelled emotionally unavailable, secretive, or worse… boring. But the right to opacity is not an act of evasion. It is a moral stance. A quiet résistance to being turned into a character in someone else’s feed. Discretion, once a mark of maturity, now feels like an anachronism in a world where even heartbreaks are timestamped and SEO-optimised.
What we forget, because we’re being trained to forget, is that secrecy is not always shameful. It can be reverent. Silence isn’t necessarily a refusal to speak, but an acknowledgement that some truths are better tended than told. That not everything raw must be served. That some parts of us are still marinating, unready to be plated for strangers.
We don’t trust what isn’t legible anymore. We have conflated vulnerability with exposure and transparency with intimacy. But there is a vast difference between being known and being seen. One is slow, recursive, and earned; the other is rapid and ravenous, offering visibility as a poor substitute for understanding.
And so the wild shrinks because we have stopped venturing into it, not because it has disappeared. We have chosen the garden instead: neatly pruned, algorithmically arranged, and always under surveillance.
To Love in Private (A Brief Manifesto for the Post-Romantic)
There is a rare and particular relief in knowing that a kiss – mine, specific, tender, and un-Instagrammed – won’t become content. That no one will retroactively narrate it with a trending Taylor Swift lyric or a caption about healing. It’s strange how unfamiliar this now feels, even to me: the idea that love might exist without witnesses. That affection, care, even lust, could thrive in the unrecorded margins of daily life, without so much as a single thumbs-up. To love in private today is not simply a stylistic preference anymore, it is a political act. A refusal. A revolt of reverence.
I once received a letter, handwritten, on unlined paper folded into a square that didn’t quite fit the envelope, that said only this: I’m learning how not to ruin good things by explaining them too soon. I’ve never forgotten it. I never responded. I didn’t need to. It wasn’t an invitation to perform closeness, or to respond with equal eloquence. It was an act of intimacy that asked nothing of me but presence. I still have the letter, tucked between pages of a book I can’t lend out. Every time I find it, it reminds me that some kinds of connection live best in the unspoken. That articulation, while useful, often arrives too early or too loud.
We like to believe we archive memories, when in fact we often just market our desirability. The photograph of the dinner, the photo booth kiss, the clasped hands silhouetted against fireworks…. these are not souvenirs of love, but advertisements of a self deemed lovable. We construct narratives of coherence and compatibility for an imagined audience, forgetting that the real thing – love, actual love – is far less legible. It’s weird. It’s inconvenient. It shows up late and ruins your schedule. It’s frequently off-brand.
I’ve loved people who didn’t photograph well. I’ve ruined entire weekends trying to explain a feeling that couldn’t be cropped or clarified. I’ve embarrassed myself. I’ve contradicted myself. I’ve walked out in a rage and come back in a whisper. That, I think, is when love is working… when it escapes your script. When it breaks the form you prepared for it.
And yet we are encouraged, sometimes explicitly, more often ambiently, to make our intimacy aesthetically palatable. To curate closeness, to smooth out the inconsistencies, the silence, the slow days that don’t photograph well. But what happens to love when it becomes an aesthetic? What happens when our relationships are rendered into legible arcs, perfected for engagement, always prepared for their close-up?
What happens is this: you begin performing not the person you love, but the idea of being someone who is loved. You don’t share the truth of your relationship, you share the highlights. You speak to the version of your partner that others would find impressive. You become publicists for your private lives. You forget how to speak in private voices.
To love in private is not to withhold. It is to hallow. To protect the sacred from being converted into storyline. It is not an act of care, not of shame. A refusal to flatten something expansive into a format that fits square tiles or clickable captions.
Love, when it is most alive, resists summary.
To Be Happy in Private: A Lost Art
I no longer remember exactly when happiness became something to be rendered, but I suspect it coincided with the moment brunch became a lifestyle brand and not just a meal. Somewhere between the overhead latte shot and the performative laughter staged against pastel backdrops, we began to confuse joy with its documentation. Actually… not just confuse, but conflate. Happiness now requires an audience, or at the very least, a camera roll. It is no longer enough to be happy; we must appear so, in curated light, with artisanal lighting, and a caption that feigns spontaneity while quietly agonising over tone.
This is the real scam: the more visible your joy, the more you become responsible for maintaining it. The smile posted on a Wednesday afternoon must return on Friday. The soft glow of contentment becomes, quickly, a full-time job. You are no longer living, you’re maintaining a performance. And then, you’re performing not for others, but for the version of yourself you believe they expect. A self not built from within, but mirrored back by pixels and approval metrics.
Last week, standing in a small bakery just off rue des Martyrs, I laughed so hard at something, something completely ridiculous and entirely forgettable, that I nearly dropped my croissant. There was no photograph. No story. No one even noticed, save for the old man by the window who smiled faintly, as if remembering something he had once found funny too. And for a second, I almost mourned the missed opportunity to share it. Almost. But then I didn’t. And that moment, strange in its smallness, became more precious because it wasn’t archived. Because it belonged only to me.
To be happy in private is not to hoard joy like a secret trophy, it is to let it live untranscribed. To allow the mood, the place, the odd laughter or absurdity, to pass through you like weather, unrecorded and undisturbed. Joy, at its most potent, is not aesthetic, it is atmospheric. Huge difference! It doesn’t require applause. It doesn’t even require continuity. It just arrives, then fades, like a breeze that lifts your hair in passing and then moves on.
The tragedy of our age is that we have begun to suspect that unshared joy is somehow lesser. That unless it’s been liked, it might not have happened at all. But this is an illusion born of oversaturation and chronic visibility. Because true happiness, real, bone-deep, untidy happiness, rarely photographs well. It is too unstructured. Too unplanned. It doesn’t fit into frames or translate into captions.
You don’t owe your joy to anyone else’s feed. You don’t have to convert it into a storyline. Let it bloom! Let it vanish! Let it not mean anything!
The Ontology of Not Posting
We live now as if auditioning for the life we already inhabit, staging it, refining it, waiting for the right lighting before we commit to the moment. It’s no longer enough to feel something; we must furnish proof. Is it narcissism? That word, bloated from misuse, no longer captures the texture of our dilemma. This is about reality drift. About what happens when presence becomes contingent on projection. We don’t simply document life, we begin to trust the documentation more than the event itself.
The surveillance is soft now, ambient, dressed up in the language of community and “authentic connection”. It arrives not as threat, but as invitation: Share this. Let us in. Be vulnerable. Be known. It comes with pastel icons and dopamine feedback loops. It does not demand… it seduces… far more dangerous.
And so we comply. Slowly, without noticing. We begin narrating our lives in advance, mentally composing captions in real time, measuring moments not by depth but by their shareability. A sunset becomes a prompt, it’s not a natural phenomenon anymore. A crisis is paused until the lighting improves. Even our silence is curated, explained, positioned. We no longer trust that an unposted moment still holds weight. We need the archive. The timestamp. The “proof of feel”.
I have caught myself mid-thought – mid-feeling, really – editing it into a sentence I could someday share. As if language preceded emotion. As if the lived experience were incomplete until it had passed through a social lens. What we used to call memory, we now outsource. What we once protected with reverence, we now offer to the feed for feedback. We no longer know who we’re talking to. Or for.
This is not nostalgia. I don’t want to live off-grid or churn butter or pretend that rotary phones were romantic. But I do want to ask a question that now feels, somehow, radical: if a moment is not made public, can it still shape us? Can a transformation still occur if no one else observes it? Can grief still count if you don’t caption it? Can love?
What gets lost in this obsession with visibility is our privacy of course, and it is our faith in the interior. In the unspoken, the undocumented, the unscripted. The soul, if such a thing still exists in public discourse, has become suspect precisely because it cannot be photographed.
There are times I want to disappear, not dramatically, not with a manifesto, but quietly, like mist. Not as an act of withdrawal, but of reclamation. To recover the sound of my own voice when it doesn’t perform clarity or insight. To sit in the middle of a moment without narrating it. To live a minute that belongs to no one else. To be unseen, and still, somehow, real.
Wealth, Whispered (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Who Says “Just Buy the Course”)
There was a time, not idyllic, not free of rot, but quieter, when wealth gestured instead of announced. It moved obliquely, carried in fabrics that didn’t scream their price and in homes with creaking floorboards and books that looked read. Old money whispered (as the cliché goes). Because it could. It didn’t need to justify itself. Its very silence was part of the performance.
But now, wealth performs at volume. It tweets. It livestreams. It offers discount codes for enlightenment and promises six-figure clarity if you just follow the right funnel. It wears branded gratitude and films its generosity in 4K. It weeps on cue about burnout while sipping adaptogens on a Bali retreat. This is not success. This is theatre. Bad theatre. The kind that relies on sponsored monologues and TikTok testimonials.
I’ve watched influencers sob into ring lights while selling self-love templates. I know a woman whose entire business model was “teaching people how to be authentic”… a phrase so carnivorous in its irony that I still twitch when I hear it. She cried often on Zoom. Always at the right moment. Always with a tissue just slightly out of frame, as if sincerity required props.
Let me be clear: I am not shaming money. I’m not idealising poverty. I do know that financial stability is not optional, nor is it a sin. But there is a growing performance culture around wealth that distorts the very idea of achievement. Success has become inseparable from its own exhibition. We have collapsed the distinction between prosperity and visibility. If it’s not shared, if it doesn’t go viral, did you even win?
But wealth, when it is real, earned, silent, and structurally sound, rarely needs to announce itself. It moves like mercury. Fluid, quicksilver, unbothered. It does not need hashtags to justify its origin story or a 12-step monetisation plan disguised as altruism. It doesn’t confuse scale with depth. It doesn’t mistake attention for value.
And perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t need to convert every failure into a teachable moment. Every misstep into “content”. There is now a peculiar trend, particularly among those fluent in the language of hustle, to narrate even their falls with prepackaged insight. Failure, once a wound, is now a launch strategy. A rebrand. A teaser for the next round of funding.
But not everything needs to be repurposed. Some things are just… hard. Quietly, privately hard.
Real wealth knows how to lose without spectacle. Real wealth doesn’t need applause to feel secure.
And if someone tells you that the only thing standing between you and six figures is a mindset module and a Canva template, ask them, gently, but firmly, why they are still selling instead of sailing.
Rebuilding (Without a Hashtag)
There is a peculiar violence in being asked to narrate your healing while you’re still bleeding. It’s premature, and so perverse! The expectation that every rupture should be rendered inspirational, every breakdown aestheticised, every inch of growth quantified and shared, it flattens recovery into performance, trauma into content, and selfhood into storyline. It’s not healing. It’s branding.
I dislike, almost viscerally, the current demand to be visibly evolving. I dislike the healing arcs posted like trailers: “Day 42 of Becoming the Best Version of Myself”, as if becoming were linear, bingeable, or best consumed in thirty-second clips with voiceovers and lo-fi beats. And I say this with full knowledge that I, too, have drafted captions during emotional collapse. I, too, have tried to distill pain into something legible, maybe even likable, while still mid-spiral. Because silence, these days, reads like failure. Or worse: irrelevance.
But the truth is that metamorphosis doesn’t make good content. The cocoon doesn’t broadcast. It seethes in private. It unravels the creature entirely before something new can take shape. And no one, not your followers, not your audience, not even your therapist, gets a satisfying ending montage. Because there isn’t one. Not really. There’s just the work. The slow, clumsy work of becoming less broken, then maybe more whole, then maybe, if you’re lucky, something closer to strange and bright again.
A good therapist (and I’ve met both the good and the dangerously poetic kind) once told me, “You don’t owe anyone a narrative right now”. At the time, I thought she meant I didn’t have to explain myself. But what she meant, what she knew, was that explanation is its own seduction. That sometimes we tell the story too soon in order to escape the discomfort of being inside it. That branding your healing may actually prevent it.
I know people who have built entire identities around what they have overcome. Who post daily about boundaries, triggers, red flags, shadow work. And maybe that helps them. Maybe it helps others. But sometimes I wonder what happens when your past pain becomes your primary persona. When you have to keep performing your survival in order to stay relevant.
Rebuilding should be messy. Nonlinear. Quiet. It should include relapses, regressions, and strange detours that make no sense to anyone else. And most importantly, it should happen, at least in part, in the dark. Not because the dark is glamorous or poetic. But because it is necessary. Things grow differently when no one is watching. Roots take hold without commentary.
Not everything needs to be rebranded as resilience. Not every rupture requires a redemption arc. Some things just break. Some things just end. And some selves have to disappear, wordlessly, before new ones can begin.
In Praise of Mystery (and the Power of Not Knowing)
I find increasingly vulgar how quickly we expect people to explain themselves. Not just explain, but confess… publicly, eloquently, on demand. It’s as if withholding any part of one’s inner world has become a moral failing, a red flag, or worse, a sign of irrelevance. We now speak about “transparency” as if it were the highest virtue, forgetting that glass is also the easiest thing to shatter. And that mystery – true mystery, the kind that simmers quietly beneath the surface of a person – is not deception. It’s dignity.
We have confused oversharing with intimacy, as if depth could be measured in volume. As if flooding the room with all your story, all at once, somehow made you more knowable. But what is left of knowing when everything is already stated? What do we discover in someone else if there is nothing left to reveal?
I’ve said too much before. I’ve offered things I wasn’t ready to explain. And I’ve watched the words, once spoken or posted or performed, become fixed, static. What once lived inside me as contradiction, uncertainty, flickering insight, now calcified into a single take, a version of myself I then had to maintain. That’s the risk of exposure… not that others will misinterpret you, but that you will stop evolving because you’ve already been interpreted.
Mystery, when it is allowed to exist without apology, is an absolute form of autonomy. It is the part of you that does not audition. That does not seek applause. That resists articulation not because it is ashamed but because it is in process. Because it has not yet become anything fixed or postable. And might never.
I miss mystery in people the way one misses a language they once spoke fluently. There used to be a kind of eroticism in not knowing. A space for projection, speculation, slow learning. Now we arrive prepackaged, bios optimised, playlists public, therapy wounds disclosed in carousel format. There is no room for the unknown. Only the announced.
Not everything needs to be said. Not everything should. Some truths require marination, solitude, discomfort, maybe even contradiction. Others aren’t truths yet at all, just impulses still finding shape. And some, if we are honest, are meant only for one person. Or no one. That doesn’t make them secrets. It makes them sacred.
Mystery, like silence, is an endangered form of presence. It asks you to stay. Not scroll. Not decide. Just stay.
Let the unfinished remain unfinished.
Let yourself be one of the things that is not ready to explain itself.
Closing the Curtain (Or Trying To)
Here’s the part where I acknowledge the obvious: I’ve just written several thousand words on the value of privacy and I’m publishing them online, where they will be read, bookmarked, screenshot, skimmed, and possibly used as proof that I, too, am part of the performance. And I am. Of course I am. That’s the trap. That’s the point.
There is no pure outside to this system. No moral high ground, no secret meadow where the “real” people live offline in poetic revolt, writing handwritten letters and feeding sourdough starters without photographing them. I’m not advocating retreat. I don’t want to disappear into a luddite utopia and pretend that signal doesn’t structure our lives. I’m not even sure I could stop narrating myself, even if I wanted to. The urge to be witnessed is baked in. Human. Painfully so.
What I’m arguing for is not purity, but pause. Not silence, but selection. The right to be inconsistent. To tell a story and then regret telling it. To post, then delete. To disappear for reasons too nuanced to explain. To withhold not out of shame but autonomy. There’s a difference, though it’s rarely acknowledged online, between hiding and holding something close.
We talk a lot about freedom these days, but rarely about interiority. About the inner room no one else can enter. The part of us that does not perform, does not brand, does not turn itself inside out for comprehension. That space, increasingly, feels like a relic. Or a luxury. Or both.
Still, I believe in it. Or I want to. Even as I erode it with every essay I write, every line I try to polish into resonance. I believe there is something worth preserving beneath all the articulation. A self that does not need to be translated to be true.
Let the others monetise their moments!
Let your soul remain untagged!
Or not.
Maybe you’ll post it anyway. Maybe I will too. Maybe that’s the final contradiction we live inside now, that we are both the curtain and the spotlight, both the stage and the witness, both the secret and the scream.
And maybe the true luxury isn’t privacy at all.
Maybe it’s complexity.
And the right to keep living inside it.
Ever behind the curtain, unrendered but real, unfiltered, uncaptioned, undone – on purpose,
Tamara
"Let the unfinished remain unfinished" she says, as she concludes what might be the most comprehensive and complete autopsy of our performative and conceptually vapid status-update-obsessed culture. A complete diagnosis and treatment program for a generation who thinks it's entirely normal to spend thousands of dollars attending an event they will only view through their phone, while creating a document out of it they will never revisit; a generation who preaches about mindfulness and healing by commodifying their daily lives and immortalizing their suffering; a generation who measures relevance by "likes" while "protecting their peace" from the sticky and inconvenient obligations of real-life relationships.
"Not everything needs to be said", as you publish a document that leaves me with very little to add. This piece will resonate with many, many people, because you've managed to curate many of the errant thoughts and feelings we've all intuited about the state of social relations, assembling them into a comprehensive and cohesive exhibit that should be viewed by everyone in the present, and studied closely by those baffled future archaeologists. Extraordinary work.
I could go on about how this resonates with me and my lack of online engagement, but on the advice of one of my favorite writers I'll allow myself to remain unexplained.
This is glorious and I need to read it again, and again, to properly digest this. I’ve never been on social media. Although I am on this of course but this feels different. I’m a very private person and don’t feel comfortable revealing myself to others en masse. Plus I don’t believe that anyone is or will be remotely interested in anything I have to say. Never had Facebook or Insta and never will. No smart devices except my phone, which I accept I’m on way too much, seeking connection like everybody else. People mistake me for some sort of Luddite. I don’t care. Gloriously written as always. Thank you.