What’s sharp here is not the refusal to post, but the refusal to prematurely capitalise experience. You’re not arguing for disappearance. You have just diagnosed a sequencing error. Experience now enters circulation before it’s internalized, and what gets lost is the pressure that allows something to thicken into meaning. That’s a real intervention, and it lands because you inhabit it without moralizing it.
Platforms misprice experience. They reward legibility over latency. Anything that requires incubation, ambiguity, or failure reads as low-value in a system optimized for instant return.
But some forms of value only appear after prolonged non-visibility. Think of Cézanne, endlessly repainting Mont Sainte-Victoire, canvases turned to the wall, works considered failures or exercises for years. Those unexhibited repetitions are precisely what allowed modern painting to recalibrate how seeing works. If Cézanne had been required to “ship” each attempt, to justify each canvas as content, the very thing art history later named as value would never have survived the process.
That’s what makes your stance pragmatic rather than romantic. You point out that overexposure is not neutral to production. It changes what can be made. The culture of constant signalling produces not only thinner lives, but thinner work, people who subscribe to value early, cling to relevance metrics, and then wonder why so much of what circulates feels like flop dressed up as confidence.
We’re drowning in visible output precisely because so little of it has been allowed to fail privately first.
And the clarity of your decision matters. There’s authority in your presence because you don’t posture it as purity or exile. You model discernment. You show that withholding can be a form of care for the work, for the body, for attention itself. In a landscape obsessed with proving aliveness, you’re insisting on staying alive long enough for something to actually form. Honestly, it’s one of the few sane responses left. Brava, Tamara, as always.
The sequencing error, yes! That’s the mechanism. What you’ve clarified is that the problem is the collapsed timeline between event and broadcast, between inchoate feeling and public declaration. We’ve eliminated the fermenting stage, the period where experience sits unresolved, undefended, allowed to be confused or contradictory or just unfinished. Platforms can’t accommodate that lag. They require real-time or they require retroactive coherence, but never the messy middle where things are still forming.
Your Cézanne example is devastating because it exposes what we’ve sacrificed without noticing…. the right to fail vertically, deeply, in the same problem, over and over, without each attempt being judged as a discrete product. He could spend years painting the same mountain because no one was tracking his output velocity or asking why he wasn’t diversifying his subject matter. The work got to be genuinely experimental because it wasn’t auditioned constantly. Now every attempt is a launch. Every sketch is potentially viral or potentially ignorable, but never just private iteration.
What you’re calling “mispricing” is exact. The market, and platforms are markets, can only assign value to what it can measure immediately. Long-term gestation, the kind that produces actual novelty rather than variation, doesn’t register. So we get an entire economy of premature articulation: ideas half-formed but confidently stated, work that’s competent but hasn’t had time to become strange, lives narrated so continuously that they never surprise the person living them.
The drowning in visible output while starving for substance is the paradox platforms create and can’t solve. More circulation, less depth. More demonstration, less discovery.
I’m grateful you named the sequencing problem so precisely, Alexander. It’s the hinge the whole argument turns on, and you’ve given it the technical clarity it needed.
The demand for performance, disguised as wellness checks and concern, are a product of the ephemeral and holographic nature of the online space. We act as avatars connected to other avatars, and in turn need proof of life at the same time and on the same channel, to compensate for the lack of genuine connection. In turn, the need for recognition creates the often guilt-ridden drive to perform and to reveal. And where it isn't guilt driving the compulsion, it's a fear of irrelevance; where absence turns to invisibility.
I love the point of internal coherence. The external world is, by definition, chaos, not because there isn't causal order, but because our minds aren't equipped to track the variables. The world doesn't become easier to navigate by controlling the external, but through internal coherence, guiding the person from the inside out. Your January excursions were a crucial act in the practice of this internal coherence. You experienced without documenting, fortifying your inner world by keeping those moments and memories sacred and undistilled. In the same way that we've lost the capacity to remember phone numbers and birthdays because our phones and social media do that for us, to perform an experience expels it; the experience becomes the document, thrown into the causal soup of the external, leaving a gap in the internal archive. The experience is no longer the experience, but the Instagram story or essay you wrote, which becomes redefined and even tainted by its exposure to the outside.
Ironically, it's the time away that makes you more present, because of those experiences that fortify your internal coherence. And those who really love you - those who themselves are fortified, not by your presence alone but by the knowledge that you are nourishing yourself - will be as glad that you took the time away as they are that you've returned.
The holographic metaphor is sharper than it first appears… we don’t interacting with people but with projections of people, and those projections require constant refreshing or they flicker out. The “proof of life” demand you describe is a technological requirement dressed up as care. The platform needs fresh signals to keep the avatar live. Without updates, you become Schrödinger’s friend: simultaneously present and absent until someone observes you posting.
What you’ve identified about guilt and irrelevance as the twin engines of compulsion is exact. Guilt says: “you owe people your presence”. Irrelevance says: “if you stop performing, you’ll cease to exist in any way that matters”.
Both are lies, but they are structurally embedded lies, which makes them harder to resist than if they were just personal neuroses. The system requires your anxiety to function.
Your point about the external world as chaos that can’t be controlled, only navigated through internal coherence, cuts against the entire logic of platforms, which promise that if you manage your image carefully enough, you can stabilise how others perceive you. But that’s a con. You can’t control reception. You can only exhaust yourself trying. Meanwhile, the self that isn’t performing, the one that needs quiet to consolidate what it’s learning, atrophies from neglect.
The comparison to outsourced memory is painful. We’ve handed cognitive functions to devices, and now we’re handing experiential processing to platforms. The Instagram story becomes the memory, which means the memory is now thin, public, and subject to being reshaped by how others responded to it. The internal archive, as you call it, gets hollowed out. You remember the post, not the moment. You remember the performance, not the feeling.
Thank you, Andrew, for understanding that absence is generative sometimes, not abandonment!
Tamara, your essay refuses the easy villain, and I appreciate this a lot. It doesn’t scold technology; it anatomises a reflex. That restraint gives the argument teeth. By framing privacy as protection, you expose how much of contemporary “sharing” is actually prophylactic, pre-emptive proof that we are living correctly, parenting correctly, training correctly, chewing correctly.
Which brings me to the spectacle your piece indicts: the compulsion to externalise competence. The workout filmed because discipline now requires witnesses. The carefully narrated parenting moment, “gentle but firm”, tantrum resolved on camera, not for the child, but for the audience that must be reassured you’re doing it right. The endless unboxings, the airport flat-lays, the hotel-room tours, the slow pan across breakfast, the performative awe at sunsets millions have already seen.
Even eating has become content: how you chew, what you avoid, what it signals about optimisation, control, virtue. Life reduced to demonstrations of mastery.
What’s striking is how little of this translates joy. It’s all about staying ahead of suspicion. If you don’t show the workout, did you really earn rest? If you don’t post the vacation, did it really count? If you don’t document patience with your children, are you secretly failing them? Visibility has become a moral alibi.
Your essay is incredible because it names what’s being lost. Experience needs time inside the body to do its work. Constant posting interrupts that process. It turns life into a series of outputs rather than inputs. You’re no longer changed by what happens, you’re busy translating it. The self becomes a press office for its own existence.
Obsessive documentation thins experience, and standardises it. Platforms reward recognisable forms. The same workouts, the same “hard moments”, the same enlightened parenting scripts. Over time, people don’t merely share their lives, they conform them. Difference becomes risky. Silence becomes suspicious. Interior life collapses into templates.
What you articulate so elegantly is that refusal is selectivity. A literacy about when expression deepens meaning and when it evacuates it. The essay’s strength is its pacing: it models what it argues for. You let ideas sit. You resist the punchline. You allow density. That alone feels subversive in a culture addicted to takeaways.
The most devastating insight, for me, is that when everything is shown, nothing is held. Fitness becomes proof, not sensation. Travel becomes backdrop, not disorientation. Even self-knowledge becomes performance. We end up rehearsing identities instead of inhabiting them.
So yes, some things only bloom without witnesses because attention is extractive by default. It takes something from what it touches. You don’t ask us to disappear. You imply we have to stop turning our lives into product demos. Masterpiece, Tamara.
The moral alibi function of visibility is something I only grazed at. It’s more insidious than simple vanity because it pretends to be responsibility. The parents filming the gentle discipline are immunising themselves against the accusation of doing it wrong. The workout post isn’t bragging, it’s evidence submitted to an invisible tribunal that’s always in session. We’ve internalised surveillance so thoroughly that we now supply our own documentation, preemptively, just in case someone asks.
What interests me about your observation is how it reveals the collapse of private competence. There was a time when you could simply be good at something without needing to demonstrate it continuously. You could be fit without producing fitness. You could parent well without narrating it. The skill lived in your hands, your habits, your children’s faces as they grew. Now competence that isn’t broadcast feels incomplete, even fraudulent. We’ve confused proof with practice.
The hotel-room pan, the breakfast tableau aren’t even about the hotel or the breakfast. It’s all about establishing that you’re the sort of person who has access to hotels and breakfasts worth filming. It’s semiotics dressed as autobiography. And the exhausting thing is that everyone performing this charade knows it’s a charade, but we can’t stop because stopping would mean falling out of the shared fiction that holds the whole apparatus together.
What you’ve named as “rehearsing identities instead of inhabiting them” gets at the deep ontological problem: you can’t become something you’re constantly auditioning to already be. Growth requires the privacy of failure, incoherence, not-knowing-yet. But platforms demand finished performances. So we get stuck in a loop of demonstrating what we haven’t actually embodied, which prevents us from ever embodying it.
I’m grateful for how precisely you’ve articulated the mechanics of what I could only describe impressionistically, Clara! You’ve given the argument a skeleton it needed.
In the end the real theft of the attention economy is afterlife, not time. You’re arguing for incubation, for the right of experiences to become before they’re asked to signify.
What fascinates me is your distinction between expression and extraction. That feels like the hinge everything swings on. Extraction is violent because it rushes. It turns moments into commodities before they’ve even metabolized in the body. I keep thinking about how this changes judgment, how we outsource discernment to the imagined audience.
Visibility is framed as generosity, but it’s actually compliance. The demand to be legible at all times is a form of soft surveillance, self-imposed, cheerful, gamified. Refusing it, even intermittently, means reclaiming authorship over tempo. Slowness becomes a kind of resistance. And inefficiency is intolerable to systems that want everything now, flattened, optimised, ready to circulate.
I loved the insistence that this isn’t a moral hierarchy. That restraint isn’t virtue-signalling its own way out of the trap. What you’re
describing feels closer to ecological thinking: not everything thrives under the same conditions. Some things need darkness. Some need time. Some die when overexposed. Treating all experience as if it should survive the same light is a category error and you articulate that without sanctimony, which is rare.
And stylistically, this is exquisite, Tamara. The essay breathes. It trusts the reader. The humor disarms without diluting the argument, and the intellectual references never feel forced. You don’t posture certainty. You model thinking. That, more than anything, makes the piece persuasive.
The theft of afterlife, not time, reframes everything because time can be wasted and recovered, but afterlife is the duration in which experience does something to you. That’s what gets stolen when you post too soon: the interval where something sits unresolved in your body, reshaping you in ways you can’t narrate yet because you haven’t understood them. Platforms erase that lag. They collapse event into artifact so fast that nothing has time to become consequential except as content.
Your point about outsourcing discernment to the imagined audience is exact, and it’s more toxic than it seems because it means you stop trusting your own instincts about what matters. You learn to evaluate experience through the lens of how it will be received rather than how it feels to live through. That’s a kind of perceptual damage…. you lose the ability to know what you actually think before checking whether that thought will play well.
Soft surveillance being cheerful and gamified… of course! That’s why it works. Nobody’s forcing you to participate, which means participation feels like choice, like agency, when it’s really just compliance with a set of expectations so normalised they’re invisible. The refusal to be legible at all times is a reassertion that legibility isn’t the highest good, that some forms of value require opacity to survive.
Ecological thinking is the right frame because it recognises that monoculture kills. If every experience is expected to thrive under the same conditions, immediate visibility or universal accessibility, then we lose the experiences that need shelter, patience, or strangeness to develop. Biodiversity requires niches. So does a life.
Thank you, Céline, for noting the breathing room! That mattered more to me than getting it right, whatever “right” means. I’m grateful you felt it.
Each day, for at least a decade, I chop the veggies for my dinner salad for about a half hour, that I prepare and eat alone. After preparation (and before eating!), I clean the cleaver, and sharpen the old blade for a couple minutes to a slow, comfortable, well-practiced rhythm.
There is an easy sacredness to my evening, eating devotional that would be defiled to say or post anything more about it.
I suspect every moment can be lived similarly, without performance.
You’ve described something that makes most contemporary discourse about “mindfulness” or “ritual” look clumsy and self-congratulating by comparison. The sacredness you mention is what emerges when an action is repeated enough times that it stops needing justification.
Your devotional doesn’t photograph well because it’s durational, private, and would require someone to understand why sharpening a blade for two minutes matters, which can’t be explained in a caption.
The defilement you describe, the sense that posting would damage it, is precise. The moment you translate that half-hour into content, it becomes a demonstration of someone who chops vegetables mindfully, and the actual practice gets replaced by the image of the practice. The cleaver becomes a prop. You become a character performing “person who has evening rituals”. The thing itself dies.
Your suspicion that every moment could be lived this way without requires exactly what you’ve cultivated: enough repetition that the action stops asking for witness and becomes structurally complete on its own terms.
Thank you, Randolph, for trusting that image to stand without elaboration!
That! 'Experience becomes archives', particularly captured me. I'm a photographer & a story-teller, angst-ing about taking down my website, so full of my 15 years spent living outside of New Zealand. I do believe your thoughts may have helped me through this crisis of, perhaps, how to live in the moment & not be compelled to record it all. I left FB a couple of months ago but not before downloading that vast archive of where I lived, and traveled, when & where. My online archives are vast, Insta is gone too, now for my website, and to let them has been a process, and then not to keep them here ... Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
You’re confronting something most people avoid entirely: the question of what those archives actually cost you in the present tense. Not financially, but attentionally. We pay a sort of psychic rent for maintaining these vast repositories of former selves, and I suspect the angst you’re feeling is related to recognising how much energy goes into curating what’s already happened instead of being available to what’s happening now.
The photographer’s dilemma is particularly acute because your training has made you exceptionally good at seeing, which paradoxically can interfere with experiencing. You’ve developed an eye that frames before it feels. That’s a professional asset and an existential liability at the same time. The question isn’t whether to stop making images, that would be absurd, but whether every image needs to persist indefinitely in public view, demanding context or relevance.
I wonder if the situation you’re in is actually about permission. Permission to let some of those 15 years exist only in your body’s memory, imperfectly, without the safety net of retrieval. The downloaded archive from Facebook proves you’re not erasing anything, just deciding it doesn’t need to perform anymore. It can rest. So can you.
I’m grateful you shared this, Di, particularly because it reveals how deeply these questions cut for people whose entire practice involves capturing. Your struggle makes the argument more honest than I could alone.
Thank you for this thoughtful reply. I copy/pasted it, to study at leisure. It’s a hot summer’s day, down here in New Zealand, and thought is, quite simply, beyond me. Tomorrow morning … but thank you.
So, I got to this quote and a torrent of excited thoughts cascaded out… I share this in the hope that you can arrange it more elegantly than I have. :).
“We’re so busy producing the artifact that we skip the event itself, or worse, we perform the event for the artifact’s sake, which is a kind of existential hollowing-out I don’t think we’ve fully reckoned with yet.” Says the Museguided one :P
Ohh my, yes… and it is now a few layers removed from actual experience. Because the artifact is in vogue right now as the primary concern, but even the event has an illusory element. That layer of event is also added to the bedrock of experience “the ever-present experience of right this moment (look at my linguistic gymnastics around trying to avoid the pronouncement of the tarnished word: now). So first you have an experience, a flow of sensations that is your consciousness (the lower part of the iceberg :P) then you start documenting events to make sense, and now we take the added addling step of trying to edit those events into artifacts that we share in a marketplace… this sounds bad. Probably because it is bad.
If our experience is a never-ending flow, then an event is a measuring exercise, useful for survival but hollowing to the soul. Still, this transaction confers a survival benefit. Hoarding for artifacts in binary, seems to be the most dangerous version of artifacts, it seems to be a truly problematic rewiring of our experience. It is a new flavour of fixing, and holding, experience in place. We used to do this though art, jewellery, music, crafts of materials… slowly, with purpose and skill that required someone to live in flow. At least the artisans were incentivized to find that true state of human experience of flow and turn it into an artifact of human physical creation . But in the modern world, artifacts can be conjured immediately with global scale, care is lost for immediacy. And we can all create an artifact with a tap and a swipe from a ludicrously powerful device. How that must be addling the mind, and hollowing the soul? It must be happening in overdrive: now we have essence anemia. The transaction, is not worth it. Creating artifacts at this rate doesn’t confer a survival benefit, it confers community-wide anxiety and suffering.
I’m so glad you mentioned the texture of experience. For me taste is very texture based, a meal with certain physical characteristics will disrupt my taste experience for good or bad despite all other taste-related inputs. This is what the reality you discuss feels like, the one with flattened textural experiences: it tastes like bland, grey, slop. The cornucopia of possible experiences have collapsed down to pixels, to human-sized quants of life that are devoid of meaning. I’m not sure if this a real word but I will try it here: life mediated by screens only, this feels… atextural.
We get to the threshold experiences—the experiences that mean everything to us as humans—and we are conditioned to scramble to mark the event with an artifact. Oh no. We are leaving the experience in the wake of something that isn’t alive. The event and the artifact aren’t alive and yet, this is what we are attuning our experience to (bloated by financial incentives that incentivize us to maintain this conditioning.
Let me echo your pleas for intervals, and add that in the space between, remember you are not ‘events’ and you are not ‘artifacts,’ be happy in the knowledge that you are flow and rest in those experiences before you seek to document it.
This, without a word of a lie (sorry Private Lives and Intimacy Illusion), this essay is at the top of the Museguided pantheon.
Don’t get me started on the art. How you found this style of contemporary art and connected with this topic, strikes me as an unfair skill to have in addition to the thinking and writing you have shared here. So before I continue fawning to cringe-levels, I will just pause, and thank you for this essay.
The cascade experience to event to artifact is the genealogy nobody wants to acknowledge because it reveals how far we’ve drifted from the thing itself. You’re right that even the “event” is already a measuring exercise, a frame imposed on continuous flow to make it graspable, narratable, useful for memory and coordination. That’s not inherently destructive; it’s how humans have always operated. We chunk experience into discrete units because pure flow is illegible, can’t be shared, can’t be learned from. The problem isn’t the event; it’s what we’ve done with the artifact.
Your distinction between historical artifacts and digital ones is amazing because it names the difference in production time. The artisan who spends months on a single object is living in flow while making the thing. The act of creation is itself a form of prolonged attention, immersion, skill accumulated over years. The artifact carries that duration inside it. You can feel the hours when you hold it. But the digital artifact costs nothing temporally. A photo takes a second. A story takes ten. There’s no résistance, no material constraint, no need to develop mastery. The result is that we’re producing artifacts at a rate that wildly exceeds our capacity to generate experiences worth artifacting. We’re manufacturing proof faster than we’re living lives that need proving.
“Essence anemia”… yes! That’s the metabolic crisis. We’re hemorrhaging substance because we’re converting experience into artifacts too quickly, before the body has absorbed anything, before meaning has had time to sediment. The survival benefit has inverted. Instead of artifacts helping us remember and transmit important knowledge, they’re actively preventing us from forming coherent memories because we’ve outsourced remembering to the device. The phone holds the memory, so the brain doesn’t bother. Except the phone’s memory is thin, decontextualised, stripped of the sensory surround that makes memory emotionally weighted and therefore useful.
The texture metaphor, atextural life, is exact. Screens flatten dimensionality into pixels, which are uniform, interchangeable, without grain. Everything tastes the same because everything is mediated through the same interface. A conversation, a landscape, a meal, a face…. all reduced to the same glowing rectangle, the same scroll, the same metric of engagement. The cornucopia collapses into a single channel, and we lose the ability to distinguish between experiences because they’ve all been homogenised into content.
Your point about threshold experiences is where the argument becomes genuinely alarming because those are the moments that should rewire us, that should leave us irrevocably changed. But if we scramble to document them before we’ve even registered what’s happening, we interrupt the process by which the experience embeds itself in us. We trade transformation for evidence. And evidence doesn’t change you; it just proves you were there. Which is not the same thing as being there.
The plea to rest in flow before documenting… then that’s the move! Not to never document, but to let the experience complete itself first.Let it do its work on you. Let it reshape something internal before you ask it to become external, shareable, legible to strangers. That lag is where the self gets built. Without it, you’re just a clearinghouse for other people’s content, including your own.
Thank you, Adam, for the cascade, for taking my essay seriously enough to think through its implications further than I did! That’s the kind of response that makes writing feel less like broadcasting into a void and more like beginning a conversation that someone else finishes better than you started it. And you do have this unique talent.
"WHEN WORDS DESTROY" is a book co-authored by the French essayist and journalist Monique Atlan and the French philosopher Roger Pol Droit, originally published in 2023.
Never in history have we communicated so much, and yet perhaps never have we spoken so little.
Most humans today live as silent solitaries immersed in a torrent of discourse that belongs to no one.
This tsunami of out-of-control phrases overwhelms us instead of liberating us. The number of speakers multiplies, but almost no one speaks to anyone, because everyone speaks without listening or responding.
The more we speak, the less we speak. Quantity explodes, quality implodes. Discourses seem to flourish, and we don't realize they are deteriorating.
This situation jeopardizes the very existence of humanity; there is no imaginable catastrophe more lethal than the deterioration of speech.
Words are our superpower as living beings; words build and destroy. Break the silence to denounce domination, violence, or to give voice to silent.
This turns clearest when imagining if for most of our existence, we lived literally locked inside technology, until one day, miraculously freed from the chains of battery percentage and ‘engagement’ ratios, we can begin to wander and wonder without a haptic web of promising distraction. The compulsion to share seems to come from a good place most often, the example of refraining from leaving cold without a public message seems polite and mitigates worry, given whatever degree of established consistency. Negative aspects coagulate, aside from the underlying nature of life’s knack for competition, from the digital thinness inherent in technology’s limitations; it was always just a façade approximating our emotional complexities.
The prison metaphor works better than it should because most prisons don’t require locks once the inmates have internalised the schedule. We’ve done that with our devices, structured our nervous systems around their rhythms until the compulsion feels native, biological even, when it’s really just conditioning that’s had a decade to set.
What you’re describing as the “haptic web of promising distraction” is precisely that: a lattice of small pleasures calibrated to interrupt before anything deeper can establish itself.
But I’m more interested in your point about politeness because of the social contract dimension. We’ve created expectations around availability and responsiveness that weren’t there before, and now opting out does register as rudeness, or at least as requiring explanation. The person who doesn’t announce their departure from a platform is violating an unwritten rule about managing other people’s expectations. Which is mad, when you think about it, the idea that my interior life is somehow owed as a broadcast.
What’s clarifying about your phrase “digital thinness” is that it names the medium’s inherent poverty without blaming the people using it. The technology was never built to carry the weight of actual intimacy. It’s a sketch of connection, a wireframe, and we keep trying to inhabit it as if it were a finished structure. The façade can approximate emotional complexity, but approximation is its ceiling. No amount of better design will fix what’s missing, which is physical presence, durability, the friction that creates depth.
The wandering and wondering you represent what gets lost first and noticed last. The ambient space where thinking happens without objective. We’ve filled every gap with stimulus, and then we’re confused about why nothing coheres.
Thank you for bringing the politeness angle in, it complicates the withdrawal in ways that feel true and under-discussed!
It’s tricky out there and easy to take for granted, as we slip into complacency. Prisons and jail by design rely on locks and schedules so strict that the time between scheduled ‘rounds’ generates a bizarre ‘freedom-adjacent pocket’ ripe for specific aspects of life to unfold in the only way that it can, when cornered.
In the wider context of normal life, we’ve indeed muddied our dynamic, ‘native biological compulsion’ with the oversimplified cleverness of binary programs. It could be, in the far future, quantum computers overcome this because the tools that that type of processing will provide will far exceed the now claustrophobic tools of binary. Consider just as well how difficult it is to shift our foundation between base 2, base 10, base 16, etc. It’s difficult to say in a hurry exactly where some tradition of behavior to express politeness belongs or not. For instance, excusing oneself momentarily from a group, mid dinner. Subjectively, it may be accidentally just as rude to interrupt for the trivial sake of excusing oneself.
It’s nice to think, that as gentle expressions of gratitude and empathetic desire for mutual understanding, that such expressions represent a beneficial ‘wider love’. But that path is quick to turn so vague as to only add new frustrated confusions. Unshared by bad actors, can quickly become leverage against ‘weakness’. I can respond now by saying, I love your responses. They appear, as far as my experience can so far see, to carry genuine curiosity and concern to represent uncommon perspective, thorough careful thinking, and a patient willingness against the possibility of having wasted time. Where will this thread be in six months? Will it be easy to find? Does the ‘highest’ ideal demand that one bookmarks and categorizes it locally? To what degree should value for meaningful interaction, however digitally masked, be guarded?
The freedom-adjacent pocket you describe in prisons is grimly instructive. Even total control can’t eliminate the gaps where something unauthorised happens, which means the compulsion toward autonomy is so fundamental that it finds expression even in the thinnest margins. What we’ve done in civilian life is stranger… we’ve accepted schedules we could refuse, internalised surveillance no one explicitly demanded, and called it connection. At least prisoners know they’re constrained.
Your speculation about quantum computing is interesting, though I suspect the problem isn’t the binary limitation of the tools but our willingness to let tools determine social grammar in the first place. Even infinitely sophisticated technology won’t solve the question of whether an interruption at dinner is rude. That’s a question of context, relationship, and tacit understanding that no processing power can calculate. We keep hoping technical solutions will spare us from having to navigate ambiguity, and they won’t. They’ll just give us more sophisticated ways to avoid the discomfort of not knowing.
The politeness question you raise, whether excusing oneself is more or less rude than not excusing oneself, reveals how much contemporary etiquette has been outsourced to platforms that can’t handle nuance. Everything gets flattened into binary: posted or not posted, read or unread, responded to or ignored. But actual human exchange requires tolerance for vagueness, for things left unsaid, for gestures that mean different things depending on who’s making them.
Your concern about bad actors leveraging openness as weakness is valid and complicates the fantasy that vulnerability is always rewarded. It isn’t. At least in my opinion. Sometimes it’s punished. Sometimes kindness is mistaken for softness and exploited. That doesn’t mean withdrawal is safer, it just means discernment matters, and discernment is exhausting because it requires constant recalibration.
Hmmm…. this thread in six months… I don’t know. Probably buried. Possibly irretrievable without effort. The ephemerality is what makes the exchange feel human-scaled rather than archived for posterity. Maybe the ideal isn’t to preserve everything but to let some conversations do their work and then dissolve, the way spoken words do.
I’m grateful you’re thinking through these questions aloud here. The care in your uncertainty is more valuable than confident answers would be.
“When every moment is potentially content, you start living for the edit. You don’t ask ‘What do I want?’ but ‘What will this look like?’ Your life becomes a rough draft of someone else’s life…”
This really nails how social media can quietly pull us out of our own experience and put us into a performance version of life.
Instead of feeling what’s real, we start shaping moments for how they’ll read on a screen and that flips meaning into optics.
What really stands out is how this line shows the quiet shift that happens when we stop living for ourselves and start living for approval.
Instead of choosing what actually feels right, we shape our lives around how we want to be seen. In that sense, not posting isn’t about disappearing. It’s about taking your life back and letting it be lived, not performed.
I feel there isn’t much about this perspective of social media. I imagine it’s because a lot of people have not really sat down to deeply think about it. Many have not understood the impact of social media on our mental health and the way that it has shaped our thoughts throughout the day. Hopefully one day we will make efforts to actually live, rather than to pretend to live.
The shift from meaning to optics is the precise formulation my essay needed. You’ve identified the replacement that happens. Instead of asking whether something matters to you, you ask whether it will register as mattering to others. That’s a complete inversion of how significance gets determined. Value becomes external, conferred by reception rather than felt internally. You end up curating a life that looks meaningful according to someone else’s aesthetic while your actual preferences, the ones that don’t photograph well or narrative cleanly, atrophy from disuse.
The reason there isn’t much deep thinking about this publicly is partly structural: the people most equipped to articulate the problem are also the ones benefiting from the system, either economically or through social capital. Influencers can’t critique the attention economy without undermining their own position. Writers building audiences can’t advocate too strongly for withdrawal without seeming hypocritical. So the critique stays muted, hedged, or gets dismissed as Luddism by people who profit from dismissing it.
But you’re also right that most people haven’t sat with it long enough to see the damage clearly. The effects are gradual, ambient, easy to rationalise as personal failings rather than systemic manipulation. You’re anxious because you’re doing something wrong, not because the platform is designed to keep you anxious and checking. You feel empty because you’re not living right, not because constant performance evacuates interiority. The individual pathologises themselves instead of recognising they respond normally to an abnormal environment.
The distinction between “pretending to live” versus actually living will only become starker as platforms get better at simulating intimacy, community, or even purpose. We are already several iterations deep into people whose entire social reality is mediated by screens. What happens when that’s the only reality they know?!
Thank you, Anita, for naming the optics shift so cleanly!
Tamara, with her usual wit and accuracy, has already described the consequences of premature posting, but your comment hints at something much darker. Compulsive publicists soon start organising their experiences in anticipation of publication. The documentation doesn’t describe the experiences. The experiences are carefully selected and lived in order to support the public narrative. Initially, this may very well be conscious, but it rapidly becomes internalised and acts as an unconscious editor. What makes this particularly dangerous isn’t that the experiences are in some way inauthentic but simply that the editor closes down whole realms of possibilities.
I have a friend, an extremely talented photographer, whom I recently invited to join me on a short trip. I was absolutely convinced he would enjoy it, but he declined. Our conversation revealed that he didn’t want to come because he didn’t anticipate there would be any real opportunity for taking interesting photographs. Eventually, I persuaded him to change his mind. As anticipated, he had a wonderful time; he didn’t take any photographs, and neither of us will post any details anywhere about the trip.
The unconscious editor, that’s the mechanism that makes this more than a behavioural quirk and into something structurally damaging to selfhood. Once the filter becomes automatic, you’re no longer consciously choosing what to share versus withhold. You’re pre-selecting experiences based on their documentability, their narratability, their fit within the ongoing story you’re telling about yourself. Whole categories of experience get ruled out before they’re even attempted because they won’t produce content.
Your photographer friend’s initial refusal is the perfect case study because it exposes how thoroughly the literal and metaphorical lens had colonised his capacity to evaluate whether something was worth doing. No good shots meant no reason to go, which means his entire relationship to travel, to friendship, to novelty had been subordinated to a single question: will this yield images?
The fact that he did eventually go and had a wonderful time without photographing proves the filter was lying to him about what constituted value. But how many experiences did he decline before this one, how many possibilities closed down because the editor whispered that they wouldn’t produce anything shareable?
What’s particularly sinister is that this happens to skilled people, your friend is talented, which means the editor isn’t obviously wrong. He can produce excellent photographs, which makes the demand for photographic opportunity seem reasonable rather than tyrannical. But skill becomes a prison when it starts dictating what you’re allowed to experience. The master craftsman who can only see the world as raw material for craft has lost something essential, some basic receptivity that doesn’t ask what things are for but simply lets them be what they are.
The trip with no photographs, no posta is the corrective, and the fact that he enjoyed it anyway suggests he might have recovered something he didn’t know he had lost. Access to experience that doesn’t require instrumentalisation.
Wow, I love that article and it explains beautifully the issue we have in today's society. As you said, it looks that if someone doesn't post about something that something wasn't real. Even though I'd like to point out that there's a difference between privacy and hiding. Someone who's private is like this all the time, it doesn't matter whether in the context of social media or real life, while someone who's hiding (something or someone) it's very very thoughtful of what they post, they want to make people believe something when most of the time is the contrary.
Anyways, everyone should do what they feel like but in my opinion I don't like people who tend to overshare on social media, sharing every single thing they do, I kinda feel it's overwhelming to see 🙈
The privacy versus hiding distinction you’re drawing is sharper than most people’s intuition around this, because it identifies consistency as the marker of authenticity. Someone who’s genuinely private doesn’t perform privacy, they just are that way across contexts. Their reserve is temperamental. Whereas hiding is always reactive, always calculated in response to what might be discovered. It’s effortful in a way privacy isn’t.
What complicates this is that platforms make privacy look like hiding because they’ve established oversharing as the baseline. If everyone else is narrating their lives in real-time, the person who doesn’t starts to seem like they’re concealing something, even when they’re just living at a different informational register. We’ve culturally agreed that transparency equals honesty, which is absurd…. plenty of honest people are simply quiet. But the algorithmic incentive is toward maximum disclosure, so reticence reads as suspicious.
Your point about oversharing being overwhelming is an ecological problem. Constant updates are tedious for the person posting; they are also cognitively exhausting for everyone receiving them. The feed becomes a deluge of minor updates that all demand equal attention, and nothing can be genuinely foregrounded because everything is presented with the same urgent immediacy. A sandwich and a breakup both get the same format, the same bid for engagement. That flattening is what makes the whole apparatus feel suffocating.
The people who overshare aren’t necessarily pathological. They’ve just been trained by positive reinforcement that more visibility equals more value. Breaking that training requires noticing how little is actually gained by constant broadcast, which most people won’t do until they’re exhausted.
Alice, thank you for the privacy/hiding distinction! That was very interesting.
Your absence didn't go unnoticed and I love your reasons for it. There's very little I post on SM anymore. When I do, it's usually sharing a picture of video of our impossibly cute grandsons, mostly for the benefit of family who might not see them otherwise. I find myself keeping the phone in my pocket more often. One upside is that when I do that, I'm more present than I might have been if not for the misadventures in social media.
The grandsons exception is clarifying because it exposes how much of posting has become infrastructural rather than expressive. Family across distance needs images to stay connected to children who are growing too fast to wait for holiday visits. That’s utility, not performance, though the platform can’t tell the difference and will reward it the same way it rewards someone staging their breakfast for strangers.
What interests me about your instinct to keep the phone in your pocket is that it suggests you’ve already done the cost-benefit analysis internally and decided that presence is worth more than documentation, which sounds obvious but clearly isn’t, given how many people haven’t arrived at that conclusion yet.
The “misadventures in social media” phrasing is telling… it acknowledges the whole project has been somewhat chaotic and uncontrolled, which it has been. We’ve been collectively experimenting on ourselves for 15 years without controls, without understanding the variables, and only now are some people stepping back and asking whether the experiment was worth what it cost.
The grandsons will have no memory of you taking the photos, but they’ll have the fact that you were actually looking at them instead of at a screen. That differential will matter more than anyone can measure now.
Thank you for naming the pocket as a location! That’s exactly right, the phone goes there when you’ve decided the moment belongs to you instead of to the feed.
Thanks for your feedback, Tamara. You always reflect back incredible insight. I will admit, the phone is out plenty around the grandsons, and lots of pics and videos are taken but very few make it to social media. It's capturing these fleeting moments with our littles in a way no previous generation could. I would love something like it from our older kids, but alas, the tech didn't exist then. We have a video of our youngest, about 3 y/o, face covered in brownie batter as she "helped" mom with some baking. Maybe it's so precious because it's so rare, but I think we'd prize similar clips of her siblings if they existed.
What it all comes down to is SM is nothing but a tool. It's value and utility is revealed in how we use it. It's up to us to use it wisely.
I am still processing your post (I have read a few comments calling it essay, but I am hesitant, given your personal involvement). I wanted to offer you my unconditional understanding: despite your sensational performances (take the term in a positive sense), your humanity always emerges. And one can feel an underlying fracture or a conflict, that you eventually manage to go past, sort out and win over.
I think I have personally figured a balanced way forward, but for me it is much easier: I am no professional of academic discourse, and I have no ambition, other than having a public diary my dears and I can turn to one day, when I will be asked to leave the planet for good. That day I want to scan through it and feel proud of who I was, and how I was thinking about life.
Fun fact. I want you to be aware of.
For the longest time I have dreamed to put you in contact with a girl friend of mine who chairs a very important NGO in Paris (she is Italian, but has lived in Paris for very long now). I have the utmost admiration for this person: she reminds me of you, and vice versa, when it comes to cognitive power, intelligence, and ability to articulate thoughts in words. I will keep entertaining this dream of mine where you two meet, and talk about anything (other than small talks!)
The hesitation about calling it an essay because of personal involvement points to something I’m still working out myself: whether the first person automatically disqualifies something from being an essay or whether the essay form actually requires that vulnerability to function properly. Montaigne invented the genre by thinking aloud about his own experience, so maybe the personal isn’t a contamination but the substrate. Either way, I understand your caution. There’s a difference between argument and confession, and this piece leans toward both without fully committing to either.
Your phrase “underlying fracture or a conflict” is accurate in a way that’s slightly uncomfortable to acknowledge. The post is written from the middle of trying to figure out how to live with contradictions that won’t resolve cleanly. I don’t think I’ve won over anything. I’ve just described the terms of an ongoing negotiation between wanting to be seen and needing to be left alone, between expression as necessity and extraction as habit. That negotiation doesn’t end; it just gets more articulate.
What you’ve built for yourself, a public diary as future artifact, something to return to when accounting for a life, is structurally honest in a way most online presence isn’t. You’ve named the audience (yourself, your dears, eventual retrospection) and refused the pressure to perform for strangers. That clarity of purpose is rare. Most people, myself included, are writing for an audience we can’t define and wouldn’t recognise if we met them.
As for your dream of introducing me to your friend in Paris… I’m moved by that, genuinely. The fact that you’ve been holding that thought, imagining a conversation between two people you admire, says something about your generosity and also your taxonomy of minds. I’d be curious to meet her, not for small talk (which I’m terrible at anyway), but for the kind of exchange that leaves both people slightly different than they were before.
Thank you, Dario, for the unconditional understanding!
I am more and more stunned by your responses, considering that I am just one out of many followers.
The image I have from your original comments as well as your responses is always a heart that doesn't want the mind to pull ahead too much, and the other way around. As they want to grow together, without leaving too much gap in between, while they ascend.
I won't give up on turning that dream in reality. I am confident you would both enjoy it, in the transformative way you allude to.
The heart not letting the mind pull too far ahead is a generous read of what might also just be stubbornness about not wanting ideas to float free of felt experience. I distrust arguments that sound perfect but don’t account for the body, for contradiction, for the ways thinking happens messily before it gets cleaned up into prose. The gap you’re describing, the one that opens when intellect races ahead of emotional comprehension or vice versa, that’s where most dishonesty in writing lives. You can be technically correct and experientially false. Keeping those two modes in conversation, letting them slow each other down, that’s harder than it sounds and probably what you’re detecting.
The matchmaking impulse… I’m charmed by it, genuinely! It’s lovely believing two minds would benefit from collision and then actively trying to engineer that encounter.
When I lived in Senegal, I learned that it was wrong to take photographs of people --- they believed you were stealing their souls. On a rickety, dirty bus in Mali, I leaned out of broken window and took a picture of a boy who might have been 13 -- of his wiry body in a torn shirt hurling at me in fury, his anguished face -- I am sorry I did that.
That photograph (the boy’s fury, his body mid-hurl toward you) contains its own indictment. You stole his soul in the metaphorical sense the Senegalese meant and you took his rage without permission and now carry it decades later as a document of your own transgression. The fact that you’re still sorry, that the image haunts you not as ethical failure, suggests the belief system wasn’t superstition. Something was taken that couldn’t be returned.
The difference between that theft and what I’m describing in my essay is partly technological… you had a camera, not a phone; the image wasn’t instantly uploaded; there was still friction between capture and circulation. But the underlying violence is similar: turning a human being into an object for your archive, extracting their image without their consent because you had the power to do so and they didn’t have the power to stop you. The boy understood what was happening. His fury was accurate.
What makes your admission valuable here is that it complicates my easy binaries. Sometimes the problem isn’t performing your own life but documenting someone else’s without reckoning with what that extraction costs them. The tourists who photograph poverty, who turn suffering into spectacle, who collect images of “authentic” struggle to prove they’ve seen the world are doing the same thing platforms encourage us to do with our own experiences, just pointed outward. Both involve turning living subjects into content.
The apology lodged in that sentence, “I am sorry I did that”, is the kind of regret platforms don’t accommodate because they can’t distinguish between documentation as violation and documentation as record. The boy’s image exists somewhere, probably lost, definitely unshared, haunting only you. That’s the smallest possible containment of the damage, but it doesn’t undo it.
Thank you, Melanie, for this! It’s inspiring and it adds more layers to my essay.
What’s sharp here is not the refusal to post, but the refusal to prematurely capitalise experience. You’re not arguing for disappearance. You have just diagnosed a sequencing error. Experience now enters circulation before it’s internalized, and what gets lost is the pressure that allows something to thicken into meaning. That’s a real intervention, and it lands because you inhabit it without moralizing it.
Platforms misprice experience. They reward legibility over latency. Anything that requires incubation, ambiguity, or failure reads as low-value in a system optimized for instant return.
But some forms of value only appear after prolonged non-visibility. Think of Cézanne, endlessly repainting Mont Sainte-Victoire, canvases turned to the wall, works considered failures or exercises for years. Those unexhibited repetitions are precisely what allowed modern painting to recalibrate how seeing works. If Cézanne had been required to “ship” each attempt, to justify each canvas as content, the very thing art history later named as value would never have survived the process.
That’s what makes your stance pragmatic rather than romantic. You point out that overexposure is not neutral to production. It changes what can be made. The culture of constant signalling produces not only thinner lives, but thinner work, people who subscribe to value early, cling to relevance metrics, and then wonder why so much of what circulates feels like flop dressed up as confidence.
We’re drowning in visible output precisely because so little of it has been allowed to fail privately first.
And the clarity of your decision matters. There’s authority in your presence because you don’t posture it as purity or exile. You model discernment. You show that withholding can be a form of care for the work, for the body, for attention itself. In a landscape obsessed with proving aliveness, you’re insisting on staying alive long enough for something to actually form. Honestly, it’s one of the few sane responses left. Brava, Tamara, as always.
The sequencing error, yes! That’s the mechanism. What you’ve clarified is that the problem is the collapsed timeline between event and broadcast, between inchoate feeling and public declaration. We’ve eliminated the fermenting stage, the period where experience sits unresolved, undefended, allowed to be confused or contradictory or just unfinished. Platforms can’t accommodate that lag. They require real-time or they require retroactive coherence, but never the messy middle where things are still forming.
Your Cézanne example is devastating because it exposes what we’ve sacrificed without noticing…. the right to fail vertically, deeply, in the same problem, over and over, without each attempt being judged as a discrete product. He could spend years painting the same mountain because no one was tracking his output velocity or asking why he wasn’t diversifying his subject matter. The work got to be genuinely experimental because it wasn’t auditioned constantly. Now every attempt is a launch. Every sketch is potentially viral or potentially ignorable, but never just private iteration.
What you’re calling “mispricing” is exact. The market, and platforms are markets, can only assign value to what it can measure immediately. Long-term gestation, the kind that produces actual novelty rather than variation, doesn’t register. So we get an entire economy of premature articulation: ideas half-formed but confidently stated, work that’s competent but hasn’t had time to become strange, lives narrated so continuously that they never surprise the person living them.
The drowning in visible output while starving for substance is the paradox platforms create and can’t solve. More circulation, less depth. More demonstration, less discovery.
I’m grateful you named the sequencing problem so precisely, Alexander. It’s the hinge the whole argument turns on, and you’ve given it the technical clarity it needed.
The demand for performance, disguised as wellness checks and concern, are a product of the ephemeral and holographic nature of the online space. We act as avatars connected to other avatars, and in turn need proof of life at the same time and on the same channel, to compensate for the lack of genuine connection. In turn, the need for recognition creates the often guilt-ridden drive to perform and to reveal. And where it isn't guilt driving the compulsion, it's a fear of irrelevance; where absence turns to invisibility.
I love the point of internal coherence. The external world is, by definition, chaos, not because there isn't causal order, but because our minds aren't equipped to track the variables. The world doesn't become easier to navigate by controlling the external, but through internal coherence, guiding the person from the inside out. Your January excursions were a crucial act in the practice of this internal coherence. You experienced without documenting, fortifying your inner world by keeping those moments and memories sacred and undistilled. In the same way that we've lost the capacity to remember phone numbers and birthdays because our phones and social media do that for us, to perform an experience expels it; the experience becomes the document, thrown into the causal soup of the external, leaving a gap in the internal archive. The experience is no longer the experience, but the Instagram story or essay you wrote, which becomes redefined and even tainted by its exposure to the outside.
Ironically, it's the time away that makes you more present, because of those experiences that fortify your internal coherence. And those who really love you - those who themselves are fortified, not by your presence alone but by the knowledge that you are nourishing yourself - will be as glad that you took the time away as they are that you've returned.
Beautiful, Tamara. Welcome back.
The holographic metaphor is sharper than it first appears… we don’t interacting with people but with projections of people, and those projections require constant refreshing or they flicker out. The “proof of life” demand you describe is a technological requirement dressed up as care. The platform needs fresh signals to keep the avatar live. Without updates, you become Schrödinger’s friend: simultaneously present and absent until someone observes you posting.
What you’ve identified about guilt and irrelevance as the twin engines of compulsion is exact. Guilt says: “you owe people your presence”. Irrelevance says: “if you stop performing, you’ll cease to exist in any way that matters”.
Both are lies, but they are structurally embedded lies, which makes them harder to resist than if they were just personal neuroses. The system requires your anxiety to function.
Your point about the external world as chaos that can’t be controlled, only navigated through internal coherence, cuts against the entire logic of platforms, which promise that if you manage your image carefully enough, you can stabilise how others perceive you. But that’s a con. You can’t control reception. You can only exhaust yourself trying. Meanwhile, the self that isn’t performing, the one that needs quiet to consolidate what it’s learning, atrophies from neglect.
The comparison to outsourced memory is painful. We’ve handed cognitive functions to devices, and now we’re handing experiential processing to platforms. The Instagram story becomes the memory, which means the memory is now thin, public, and subject to being reshaped by how others responded to it. The internal archive, as you call it, gets hollowed out. You remember the post, not the moment. You remember the performance, not the feeling.
Thank you, Andrew, for understanding that absence is generative sometimes, not abandonment!
Tamara, your essay refuses the easy villain, and I appreciate this a lot. It doesn’t scold technology; it anatomises a reflex. That restraint gives the argument teeth. By framing privacy as protection, you expose how much of contemporary “sharing” is actually prophylactic, pre-emptive proof that we are living correctly, parenting correctly, training correctly, chewing correctly.
Which brings me to the spectacle your piece indicts: the compulsion to externalise competence. The workout filmed because discipline now requires witnesses. The carefully narrated parenting moment, “gentle but firm”, tantrum resolved on camera, not for the child, but for the audience that must be reassured you’re doing it right. The endless unboxings, the airport flat-lays, the hotel-room tours, the slow pan across breakfast, the performative awe at sunsets millions have already seen.
Even eating has become content: how you chew, what you avoid, what it signals about optimisation, control, virtue. Life reduced to demonstrations of mastery.
What’s striking is how little of this translates joy. It’s all about staying ahead of suspicion. If you don’t show the workout, did you really earn rest? If you don’t post the vacation, did it really count? If you don’t document patience with your children, are you secretly failing them? Visibility has become a moral alibi.
Your essay is incredible because it names what’s being lost. Experience needs time inside the body to do its work. Constant posting interrupts that process. It turns life into a series of outputs rather than inputs. You’re no longer changed by what happens, you’re busy translating it. The self becomes a press office for its own existence.
Obsessive documentation thins experience, and standardises it. Platforms reward recognisable forms. The same workouts, the same “hard moments”, the same enlightened parenting scripts. Over time, people don’t merely share their lives, they conform them. Difference becomes risky. Silence becomes suspicious. Interior life collapses into templates.
What you articulate so elegantly is that refusal is selectivity. A literacy about when expression deepens meaning and when it evacuates it. The essay’s strength is its pacing: it models what it argues for. You let ideas sit. You resist the punchline. You allow density. That alone feels subversive in a culture addicted to takeaways.
The most devastating insight, for me, is that when everything is shown, nothing is held. Fitness becomes proof, not sensation. Travel becomes backdrop, not disorientation. Even self-knowledge becomes performance. We end up rehearsing identities instead of inhabiting them.
So yes, some things only bloom without witnesses because attention is extractive by default. It takes something from what it touches. You don’t ask us to disappear. You imply we have to stop turning our lives into product demos. Masterpiece, Tamara.
The moral alibi function of visibility is something I only grazed at. It’s more insidious than simple vanity because it pretends to be responsibility. The parents filming the gentle discipline are immunising themselves against the accusation of doing it wrong. The workout post isn’t bragging, it’s evidence submitted to an invisible tribunal that’s always in session. We’ve internalised surveillance so thoroughly that we now supply our own documentation, preemptively, just in case someone asks.
What interests me about your observation is how it reveals the collapse of private competence. There was a time when you could simply be good at something without needing to demonstrate it continuously. You could be fit without producing fitness. You could parent well without narrating it. The skill lived in your hands, your habits, your children’s faces as they grew. Now competence that isn’t broadcast feels incomplete, even fraudulent. We’ve confused proof with practice.
The hotel-room pan, the breakfast tableau aren’t even about the hotel or the breakfast. It’s all about establishing that you’re the sort of person who has access to hotels and breakfasts worth filming. It’s semiotics dressed as autobiography. And the exhausting thing is that everyone performing this charade knows it’s a charade, but we can’t stop because stopping would mean falling out of the shared fiction that holds the whole apparatus together.
What you’ve named as “rehearsing identities instead of inhabiting them” gets at the deep ontological problem: you can’t become something you’re constantly auditioning to already be. Growth requires the privacy of failure, incoherence, not-knowing-yet. But platforms demand finished performances. So we get stuck in a loop of demonstrating what we haven’t actually embodied, which prevents us from ever embodying it.
I’m grateful for how precisely you’ve articulated the mechanics of what I could only describe impressionistically, Clara! You’ve given the argument a skeleton it needed.
You are a role model, Tamara. Thank you for writing. Even your absence is meaningful when it happens.
In the end the real theft of the attention economy is afterlife, not time. You’re arguing for incubation, for the right of experiences to become before they’re asked to signify.
What fascinates me is your distinction between expression and extraction. That feels like the hinge everything swings on. Extraction is violent because it rushes. It turns moments into commodities before they’ve even metabolized in the body. I keep thinking about how this changes judgment, how we outsource discernment to the imagined audience.
Visibility is framed as generosity, but it’s actually compliance. The demand to be legible at all times is a form of soft surveillance, self-imposed, cheerful, gamified. Refusing it, even intermittently, means reclaiming authorship over tempo. Slowness becomes a kind of resistance. And inefficiency is intolerable to systems that want everything now, flattened, optimised, ready to circulate.
I loved the insistence that this isn’t a moral hierarchy. That restraint isn’t virtue-signalling its own way out of the trap. What you’re
describing feels closer to ecological thinking: not everything thrives under the same conditions. Some things need darkness. Some need time. Some die when overexposed. Treating all experience as if it should survive the same light is a category error and you articulate that without sanctimony, which is rare.
And stylistically, this is exquisite, Tamara. The essay breathes. It trusts the reader. The humor disarms without diluting the argument, and the intellectual references never feel forced. You don’t posture certainty. You model thinking. That, more than anything, makes the piece persuasive.
So beautifully done.
The theft of afterlife, not time, reframes everything because time can be wasted and recovered, but afterlife is the duration in which experience does something to you. That’s what gets stolen when you post too soon: the interval where something sits unresolved in your body, reshaping you in ways you can’t narrate yet because you haven’t understood them. Platforms erase that lag. They collapse event into artifact so fast that nothing has time to become consequential except as content.
Your point about outsourcing discernment to the imagined audience is exact, and it’s more toxic than it seems because it means you stop trusting your own instincts about what matters. You learn to evaluate experience through the lens of how it will be received rather than how it feels to live through. That’s a kind of perceptual damage…. you lose the ability to know what you actually think before checking whether that thought will play well.
Soft surveillance being cheerful and gamified… of course! That’s why it works. Nobody’s forcing you to participate, which means participation feels like choice, like agency, when it’s really just compliance with a set of expectations so normalised they’re invisible. The refusal to be legible at all times is a reassertion that legibility isn’t the highest good, that some forms of value require opacity to survive.
Ecological thinking is the right frame because it recognises that monoculture kills. If every experience is expected to thrive under the same conditions, immediate visibility or universal accessibility, then we lose the experiences that need shelter, patience, or strangeness to develop. Biodiversity requires niches. So does a life.
Thank you, Céline, for noting the breathing room! That mattered more to me than getting it right, whatever “right” means. I’m grateful you felt it.
Just perfect.
So beautiful … and timeless.
Each day, for at least a decade, I chop the veggies for my dinner salad for about a half hour, that I prepare and eat alone. After preparation (and before eating!), I clean the cleaver, and sharpen the old blade for a couple minutes to a slow, comfortable, well-practiced rhythm.
There is an easy sacredness to my evening, eating devotional that would be defiled to say or post anything more about it.
I suspect every moment can be lived similarly, without performance.
You’ve described something that makes most contemporary discourse about “mindfulness” or “ritual” look clumsy and self-congratulating by comparison. The sacredness you mention is what emerges when an action is repeated enough times that it stops needing justification.
Your devotional doesn’t photograph well because it’s durational, private, and would require someone to understand why sharpening a blade for two minutes matters, which can’t be explained in a caption.
The defilement you describe, the sense that posting would damage it, is precise. The moment you translate that half-hour into content, it becomes a demonstration of someone who chops vegetables mindfully, and the actual practice gets replaced by the image of the practice. The cleaver becomes a prop. You become a character performing “person who has evening rituals”. The thing itself dies.
Your suspicion that every moment could be lived this way without requires exactly what you’ve cultivated: enough repetition that the action stops asking for witness and becomes structurally complete on its own terms.
Thank you, Randolph, for trusting that image to stand without elaboration!
That! 'Experience becomes archives', particularly captured me. I'm a photographer & a story-teller, angst-ing about taking down my website, so full of my 15 years spent living outside of New Zealand. I do believe your thoughts may have helped me through this crisis of, perhaps, how to live in the moment & not be compelled to record it all. I left FB a couple of months ago but not before downloading that vast archive of where I lived, and traveled, when & where. My online archives are vast, Insta is gone too, now for my website, and to let them has been a process, and then not to keep them here ... Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
You’re confronting something most people avoid entirely: the question of what those archives actually cost you in the present tense. Not financially, but attentionally. We pay a sort of psychic rent for maintaining these vast repositories of former selves, and I suspect the angst you’re feeling is related to recognising how much energy goes into curating what’s already happened instead of being available to what’s happening now.
The photographer’s dilemma is particularly acute because your training has made you exceptionally good at seeing, which paradoxically can interfere with experiencing. You’ve developed an eye that frames before it feels. That’s a professional asset and an existential liability at the same time. The question isn’t whether to stop making images, that would be absurd, but whether every image needs to persist indefinitely in public view, demanding context or relevance.
I wonder if the situation you’re in is actually about permission. Permission to let some of those 15 years exist only in your body’s memory, imperfectly, without the safety net of retrieval. The downloaded archive from Facebook proves you’re not erasing anything, just deciding it doesn’t need to perform anymore. It can rest. So can you.
I’m grateful you shared this, Di, particularly because it reveals how deeply these questions cut for people whose entire practice involves capturing. Your struggle makes the argument more honest than I could alone.
Thank you for this thoughtful reply. I copy/pasted it, to study at leisure. It’s a hot summer’s day, down here in New Zealand, and thought is, quite simply, beyond me. Tomorrow morning … but thank you.
Thank you too, Di!
Holy expletive…! What was that?
So, I got to this quote and a torrent of excited thoughts cascaded out… I share this in the hope that you can arrange it more elegantly than I have. :).
“We’re so busy producing the artifact that we skip the event itself, or worse, we perform the event for the artifact’s sake, which is a kind of existential hollowing-out I don’t think we’ve fully reckoned with yet.” Says the Museguided one :P
Ohh my, yes… and it is now a few layers removed from actual experience. Because the artifact is in vogue right now as the primary concern, but even the event has an illusory element. That layer of event is also added to the bedrock of experience “the ever-present experience of right this moment (look at my linguistic gymnastics around trying to avoid the pronouncement of the tarnished word: now). So first you have an experience, a flow of sensations that is your consciousness (the lower part of the iceberg :P) then you start documenting events to make sense, and now we take the added addling step of trying to edit those events into artifacts that we share in a marketplace… this sounds bad. Probably because it is bad.
If our experience is a never-ending flow, then an event is a measuring exercise, useful for survival but hollowing to the soul. Still, this transaction confers a survival benefit. Hoarding for artifacts in binary, seems to be the most dangerous version of artifacts, it seems to be a truly problematic rewiring of our experience. It is a new flavour of fixing, and holding, experience in place. We used to do this though art, jewellery, music, crafts of materials… slowly, with purpose and skill that required someone to live in flow. At least the artisans were incentivized to find that true state of human experience of flow and turn it into an artifact of human physical creation . But in the modern world, artifacts can be conjured immediately with global scale, care is lost for immediacy. And we can all create an artifact with a tap and a swipe from a ludicrously powerful device. How that must be addling the mind, and hollowing the soul? It must be happening in overdrive: now we have essence anemia. The transaction, is not worth it. Creating artifacts at this rate doesn’t confer a survival benefit, it confers community-wide anxiety and suffering.
I’m so glad you mentioned the texture of experience. For me taste is very texture based, a meal with certain physical characteristics will disrupt my taste experience for good or bad despite all other taste-related inputs. This is what the reality you discuss feels like, the one with flattened textural experiences: it tastes like bland, grey, slop. The cornucopia of possible experiences have collapsed down to pixels, to human-sized quants of life that are devoid of meaning. I’m not sure if this a real word but I will try it here: life mediated by screens only, this feels… atextural.
We get to the threshold experiences—the experiences that mean everything to us as humans—and we are conditioned to scramble to mark the event with an artifact. Oh no. We are leaving the experience in the wake of something that isn’t alive. The event and the artifact aren’t alive and yet, this is what we are attuning our experience to (bloated by financial incentives that incentivize us to maintain this conditioning.
Let me echo your pleas for intervals, and add that in the space between, remember you are not ‘events’ and you are not ‘artifacts,’ be happy in the knowledge that you are flow and rest in those experiences before you seek to document it.
This, without a word of a lie (sorry Private Lives and Intimacy Illusion), this essay is at the top of the Museguided pantheon.
Don’t get me started on the art. How you found this style of contemporary art and connected with this topic, strikes me as an unfair skill to have in addition to the thinking and writing you have shared here. So before I continue fawning to cringe-levels, I will just pause, and thank you for this essay.
Brilliant.
The cascade experience to event to artifact is the genealogy nobody wants to acknowledge because it reveals how far we’ve drifted from the thing itself. You’re right that even the “event” is already a measuring exercise, a frame imposed on continuous flow to make it graspable, narratable, useful for memory and coordination. That’s not inherently destructive; it’s how humans have always operated. We chunk experience into discrete units because pure flow is illegible, can’t be shared, can’t be learned from. The problem isn’t the event; it’s what we’ve done with the artifact.
Your distinction between historical artifacts and digital ones is amazing because it names the difference in production time. The artisan who spends months on a single object is living in flow while making the thing. The act of creation is itself a form of prolonged attention, immersion, skill accumulated over years. The artifact carries that duration inside it. You can feel the hours when you hold it. But the digital artifact costs nothing temporally. A photo takes a second. A story takes ten. There’s no résistance, no material constraint, no need to develop mastery. The result is that we’re producing artifacts at a rate that wildly exceeds our capacity to generate experiences worth artifacting. We’re manufacturing proof faster than we’re living lives that need proving.
“Essence anemia”… yes! That’s the metabolic crisis. We’re hemorrhaging substance because we’re converting experience into artifacts too quickly, before the body has absorbed anything, before meaning has had time to sediment. The survival benefit has inverted. Instead of artifacts helping us remember and transmit important knowledge, they’re actively preventing us from forming coherent memories because we’ve outsourced remembering to the device. The phone holds the memory, so the brain doesn’t bother. Except the phone’s memory is thin, decontextualised, stripped of the sensory surround that makes memory emotionally weighted and therefore useful.
The texture metaphor, atextural life, is exact. Screens flatten dimensionality into pixels, which are uniform, interchangeable, without grain. Everything tastes the same because everything is mediated through the same interface. A conversation, a landscape, a meal, a face…. all reduced to the same glowing rectangle, the same scroll, the same metric of engagement. The cornucopia collapses into a single channel, and we lose the ability to distinguish between experiences because they’ve all been homogenised into content.
Your point about threshold experiences is where the argument becomes genuinely alarming because those are the moments that should rewire us, that should leave us irrevocably changed. But if we scramble to document them before we’ve even registered what’s happening, we interrupt the process by which the experience embeds itself in us. We trade transformation for evidence. And evidence doesn’t change you; it just proves you were there. Which is not the same thing as being there.
The plea to rest in flow before documenting… then that’s the move! Not to never document, but to let the experience complete itself first.Let it do its work on you. Let it reshape something internal before you ask it to become external, shareable, legible to strangers. That lag is where the self gets built. Without it, you’re just a clearinghouse for other people’s content, including your own.
Thank you, Adam, for the cascade, for taking my essay seriously enough to think through its implications further than I did! That’s the kind of response that makes writing feel less like broadcasting into a void and more like beginning a conversation that someone else finishes better than you started it. And you do have this unique talent.
"WHEN WORDS DESTROY" is a book co-authored by the French essayist and journalist Monique Atlan and the French philosopher Roger Pol Droit, originally published in 2023.
Never in history have we communicated so much, and yet perhaps never have we spoken so little.
Most humans today live as silent solitaries immersed in a torrent of discourse that belongs to no one.
This tsunami of out-of-control phrases overwhelms us instead of liberating us. The number of speakers multiplies, but almost no one speaks to anyone, because everyone speaks without listening or responding.
The more we speak, the less we speak. Quantity explodes, quality implodes. Discourses seem to flourish, and we don't realize they are deteriorating.
This situation jeopardizes the very existence of humanity; there is no imaginable catastrophe more lethal than the deterioration of speech.
Words are our superpower as living beings; words build and destroy. Break the silence to denounce domination, violence, or to give voice to silent.
I agree with every single word here!!!
This turns clearest when imagining if for most of our existence, we lived literally locked inside technology, until one day, miraculously freed from the chains of battery percentage and ‘engagement’ ratios, we can begin to wander and wonder without a haptic web of promising distraction. The compulsion to share seems to come from a good place most often, the example of refraining from leaving cold without a public message seems polite and mitigates worry, given whatever degree of established consistency. Negative aspects coagulate, aside from the underlying nature of life’s knack for competition, from the digital thinness inherent in technology’s limitations; it was always just a façade approximating our emotional complexities.
The prison metaphor works better than it should because most prisons don’t require locks once the inmates have internalised the schedule. We’ve done that with our devices, structured our nervous systems around their rhythms until the compulsion feels native, biological even, when it’s really just conditioning that’s had a decade to set.
What you’re describing as the “haptic web of promising distraction” is precisely that: a lattice of small pleasures calibrated to interrupt before anything deeper can establish itself.
But I’m more interested in your point about politeness because of the social contract dimension. We’ve created expectations around availability and responsiveness that weren’t there before, and now opting out does register as rudeness, or at least as requiring explanation. The person who doesn’t announce their departure from a platform is violating an unwritten rule about managing other people’s expectations. Which is mad, when you think about it, the idea that my interior life is somehow owed as a broadcast.
What’s clarifying about your phrase “digital thinness” is that it names the medium’s inherent poverty without blaming the people using it. The technology was never built to carry the weight of actual intimacy. It’s a sketch of connection, a wireframe, and we keep trying to inhabit it as if it were a finished structure. The façade can approximate emotional complexity, but approximation is its ceiling. No amount of better design will fix what’s missing, which is physical presence, durability, the friction that creates depth.
The wandering and wondering you represent what gets lost first and noticed last. The ambient space where thinking happens without objective. We’ve filled every gap with stimulus, and then we’re confused about why nothing coheres.
Thank you for bringing the politeness angle in, it complicates the withdrawal in ways that feel true and under-discussed!
It’s tricky out there and easy to take for granted, as we slip into complacency. Prisons and jail by design rely on locks and schedules so strict that the time between scheduled ‘rounds’ generates a bizarre ‘freedom-adjacent pocket’ ripe for specific aspects of life to unfold in the only way that it can, when cornered.
In the wider context of normal life, we’ve indeed muddied our dynamic, ‘native biological compulsion’ with the oversimplified cleverness of binary programs. It could be, in the far future, quantum computers overcome this because the tools that that type of processing will provide will far exceed the now claustrophobic tools of binary. Consider just as well how difficult it is to shift our foundation between base 2, base 10, base 16, etc. It’s difficult to say in a hurry exactly where some tradition of behavior to express politeness belongs or not. For instance, excusing oneself momentarily from a group, mid dinner. Subjectively, it may be accidentally just as rude to interrupt for the trivial sake of excusing oneself.
It’s nice to think, that as gentle expressions of gratitude and empathetic desire for mutual understanding, that such expressions represent a beneficial ‘wider love’. But that path is quick to turn so vague as to only add new frustrated confusions. Unshared by bad actors, can quickly become leverage against ‘weakness’. I can respond now by saying, I love your responses. They appear, as far as my experience can so far see, to carry genuine curiosity and concern to represent uncommon perspective, thorough careful thinking, and a patient willingness against the possibility of having wasted time. Where will this thread be in six months? Will it be easy to find? Does the ‘highest’ ideal demand that one bookmarks and categorizes it locally? To what degree should value for meaningful interaction, however digitally masked, be guarded?
The freedom-adjacent pocket you describe in prisons is grimly instructive. Even total control can’t eliminate the gaps where something unauthorised happens, which means the compulsion toward autonomy is so fundamental that it finds expression even in the thinnest margins. What we’ve done in civilian life is stranger… we’ve accepted schedules we could refuse, internalised surveillance no one explicitly demanded, and called it connection. At least prisoners know they’re constrained.
Your speculation about quantum computing is interesting, though I suspect the problem isn’t the binary limitation of the tools but our willingness to let tools determine social grammar in the first place. Even infinitely sophisticated technology won’t solve the question of whether an interruption at dinner is rude. That’s a question of context, relationship, and tacit understanding that no processing power can calculate. We keep hoping technical solutions will spare us from having to navigate ambiguity, and they won’t. They’ll just give us more sophisticated ways to avoid the discomfort of not knowing.
The politeness question you raise, whether excusing oneself is more or less rude than not excusing oneself, reveals how much contemporary etiquette has been outsourced to platforms that can’t handle nuance. Everything gets flattened into binary: posted or not posted, read or unread, responded to or ignored. But actual human exchange requires tolerance for vagueness, for things left unsaid, for gestures that mean different things depending on who’s making them.
Your concern about bad actors leveraging openness as weakness is valid and complicates the fantasy that vulnerability is always rewarded. It isn’t. At least in my opinion. Sometimes it’s punished. Sometimes kindness is mistaken for softness and exploited. That doesn’t mean withdrawal is safer, it just means discernment matters, and discernment is exhausting because it requires constant recalibration.
Hmmm…. this thread in six months… I don’t know. Probably buried. Possibly irretrievable without effort. The ephemerality is what makes the exchange feel human-scaled rather than archived for posterity. Maybe the ideal isn’t to preserve everything but to let some conversations do their work and then dissolve, the way spoken words do.
I’m grateful you’re thinking through these questions aloud here. The care in your uncertainty is more valuable than confident answers would be.
“When every moment is potentially content, you start living for the edit. You don’t ask ‘What do I want?’ but ‘What will this look like?’ Your life becomes a rough draft of someone else’s life…”
This really nails how social media can quietly pull us out of our own experience and put us into a performance version of life.
Instead of feeling what’s real, we start shaping moments for how they’ll read on a screen and that flips meaning into optics.
What really stands out is how this line shows the quiet shift that happens when we stop living for ourselves and start living for approval.
Instead of choosing what actually feels right, we shape our lives around how we want to be seen. In that sense, not posting isn’t about disappearing. It’s about taking your life back and letting it be lived, not performed.
I feel there isn’t much about this perspective of social media. I imagine it’s because a lot of people have not really sat down to deeply think about it. Many have not understood the impact of social media on our mental health and the way that it has shaped our thoughts throughout the day. Hopefully one day we will make efforts to actually live, rather than to pretend to live.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts 💜
The shift from meaning to optics is the precise formulation my essay needed. You’ve identified the replacement that happens. Instead of asking whether something matters to you, you ask whether it will register as mattering to others. That’s a complete inversion of how significance gets determined. Value becomes external, conferred by reception rather than felt internally. You end up curating a life that looks meaningful according to someone else’s aesthetic while your actual preferences, the ones that don’t photograph well or narrative cleanly, atrophy from disuse.
The reason there isn’t much deep thinking about this publicly is partly structural: the people most equipped to articulate the problem are also the ones benefiting from the system, either economically or through social capital. Influencers can’t critique the attention economy without undermining their own position. Writers building audiences can’t advocate too strongly for withdrawal without seeming hypocritical. So the critique stays muted, hedged, or gets dismissed as Luddism by people who profit from dismissing it.
But you’re also right that most people haven’t sat with it long enough to see the damage clearly. The effects are gradual, ambient, easy to rationalise as personal failings rather than systemic manipulation. You’re anxious because you’re doing something wrong, not because the platform is designed to keep you anxious and checking. You feel empty because you’re not living right, not because constant performance evacuates interiority. The individual pathologises themselves instead of recognising they respond normally to an abnormal environment.
The distinction between “pretending to live” versus actually living will only become starker as platforms get better at simulating intimacy, community, or even purpose. We are already several iterations deep into people whose entire social reality is mediated by screens. What happens when that’s the only reality they know?!
Thank you, Anita, for naming the optics shift so cleanly!
Tamara, with her usual wit and accuracy, has already described the consequences of premature posting, but your comment hints at something much darker. Compulsive publicists soon start organising their experiences in anticipation of publication. The documentation doesn’t describe the experiences. The experiences are carefully selected and lived in order to support the public narrative. Initially, this may very well be conscious, but it rapidly becomes internalised and acts as an unconscious editor. What makes this particularly dangerous isn’t that the experiences are in some way inauthentic but simply that the editor closes down whole realms of possibilities.
I have a friend, an extremely talented photographer, whom I recently invited to join me on a short trip. I was absolutely convinced he would enjoy it, but he declined. Our conversation revealed that he didn’t want to come because he didn’t anticipate there would be any real opportunity for taking interesting photographs. Eventually, I persuaded him to change his mind. As anticipated, he had a wonderful time; he didn’t take any photographs, and neither of us will post any details anywhere about the trip.
The unconscious editor, that’s the mechanism that makes this more than a behavioural quirk and into something structurally damaging to selfhood. Once the filter becomes automatic, you’re no longer consciously choosing what to share versus withhold. You’re pre-selecting experiences based on their documentability, their narratability, their fit within the ongoing story you’re telling about yourself. Whole categories of experience get ruled out before they’re even attempted because they won’t produce content.
Your photographer friend’s initial refusal is the perfect case study because it exposes how thoroughly the literal and metaphorical lens had colonised his capacity to evaluate whether something was worth doing. No good shots meant no reason to go, which means his entire relationship to travel, to friendship, to novelty had been subordinated to a single question: will this yield images?
The fact that he did eventually go and had a wonderful time without photographing proves the filter was lying to him about what constituted value. But how many experiences did he decline before this one, how many possibilities closed down because the editor whispered that they wouldn’t produce anything shareable?
What’s particularly sinister is that this happens to skilled people, your friend is talented, which means the editor isn’t obviously wrong. He can produce excellent photographs, which makes the demand for photographic opportunity seem reasonable rather than tyrannical. But skill becomes a prison when it starts dictating what you’re allowed to experience. The master craftsman who can only see the world as raw material for craft has lost something essential, some basic receptivity that doesn’t ask what things are for but simply lets them be what they are.
The trip with no photographs, no posta is the corrective, and the fact that he enjoyed it anyway suggests he might have recovered something he didn’t know he had lost. Access to experience that doesn’t require instrumentalisation.
Thank you for this!
Wow, I love that article and it explains beautifully the issue we have in today's society. As you said, it looks that if someone doesn't post about something that something wasn't real. Even though I'd like to point out that there's a difference between privacy and hiding. Someone who's private is like this all the time, it doesn't matter whether in the context of social media or real life, while someone who's hiding (something or someone) it's very very thoughtful of what they post, they want to make people believe something when most of the time is the contrary.
Anyways, everyone should do what they feel like but in my opinion I don't like people who tend to overshare on social media, sharing every single thing they do, I kinda feel it's overwhelming to see 🙈
The privacy versus hiding distinction you’re drawing is sharper than most people’s intuition around this, because it identifies consistency as the marker of authenticity. Someone who’s genuinely private doesn’t perform privacy, they just are that way across contexts. Their reserve is temperamental. Whereas hiding is always reactive, always calculated in response to what might be discovered. It’s effortful in a way privacy isn’t.
What complicates this is that platforms make privacy look like hiding because they’ve established oversharing as the baseline. If everyone else is narrating their lives in real-time, the person who doesn’t starts to seem like they’re concealing something, even when they’re just living at a different informational register. We’ve culturally agreed that transparency equals honesty, which is absurd…. plenty of honest people are simply quiet. But the algorithmic incentive is toward maximum disclosure, so reticence reads as suspicious.
Your point about oversharing being overwhelming is an ecological problem. Constant updates are tedious for the person posting; they are also cognitively exhausting for everyone receiving them. The feed becomes a deluge of minor updates that all demand equal attention, and nothing can be genuinely foregrounded because everything is presented with the same urgent immediacy. A sandwich and a breakup both get the same format, the same bid for engagement. That flattening is what makes the whole apparatus feel suffocating.
The people who overshare aren’t necessarily pathological. They’ve just been trained by positive reinforcement that more visibility equals more value. Breaking that training requires noticing how little is actually gained by constant broadcast, which most people won’t do until they’re exhausted.
Alice, thank you for the privacy/hiding distinction! That was very interesting.
Your absence didn't go unnoticed and I love your reasons for it. There's very little I post on SM anymore. When I do, it's usually sharing a picture of video of our impossibly cute grandsons, mostly for the benefit of family who might not see them otherwise. I find myself keeping the phone in my pocket more often. One upside is that when I do that, I'm more present than I might have been if not for the misadventures in social media.
The grandsons exception is clarifying because it exposes how much of posting has become infrastructural rather than expressive. Family across distance needs images to stay connected to children who are growing too fast to wait for holiday visits. That’s utility, not performance, though the platform can’t tell the difference and will reward it the same way it rewards someone staging their breakfast for strangers.
What interests me about your instinct to keep the phone in your pocket is that it suggests you’ve already done the cost-benefit analysis internally and decided that presence is worth more than documentation, which sounds obvious but clearly isn’t, given how many people haven’t arrived at that conclusion yet.
The “misadventures in social media” phrasing is telling… it acknowledges the whole project has been somewhat chaotic and uncontrolled, which it has been. We’ve been collectively experimenting on ourselves for 15 years without controls, without understanding the variables, and only now are some people stepping back and asking whether the experiment was worth what it cost.
The grandsons will have no memory of you taking the photos, but they’ll have the fact that you were actually looking at them instead of at a screen. That differential will matter more than anyone can measure now.
Thank you for naming the pocket as a location! That’s exactly right, the phone goes there when you’ve decided the moment belongs to you instead of to the feed.
Thanks for your feedback, Tamara. You always reflect back incredible insight. I will admit, the phone is out plenty around the grandsons, and lots of pics and videos are taken but very few make it to social media. It's capturing these fleeting moments with our littles in a way no previous generation could. I would love something like it from our older kids, but alas, the tech didn't exist then. We have a video of our youngest, about 3 y/o, face covered in brownie batter as she "helped" mom with some baking. Maybe it's so precious because it's so rare, but I think we'd prize similar clips of her siblings if they existed.
What it all comes down to is SM is nothing but a tool. It's value and utility is revealed in how we use it. It's up to us to use it wisely.
Always wise, M! Thank you for this too!
Tamara,
I am still processing your post (I have read a few comments calling it essay, but I am hesitant, given your personal involvement). I wanted to offer you my unconditional understanding: despite your sensational performances (take the term in a positive sense), your humanity always emerges. And one can feel an underlying fracture or a conflict, that you eventually manage to go past, sort out and win over.
I think I have personally figured a balanced way forward, but for me it is much easier: I am no professional of academic discourse, and I have no ambition, other than having a public diary my dears and I can turn to one day, when I will be asked to leave the planet for good. That day I want to scan through it and feel proud of who I was, and how I was thinking about life.
Fun fact. I want you to be aware of.
For the longest time I have dreamed to put you in contact with a girl friend of mine who chairs a very important NGO in Paris (she is Italian, but has lived in Paris for very long now). I have the utmost admiration for this person: she reminds me of you, and vice versa, when it comes to cognitive power, intelligence, and ability to articulate thoughts in words. I will keep entertaining this dream of mine where you two meet, and talk about anything (other than small talks!)
The hesitation about calling it an essay because of personal involvement points to something I’m still working out myself: whether the first person automatically disqualifies something from being an essay or whether the essay form actually requires that vulnerability to function properly. Montaigne invented the genre by thinking aloud about his own experience, so maybe the personal isn’t a contamination but the substrate. Either way, I understand your caution. There’s a difference between argument and confession, and this piece leans toward both without fully committing to either.
Your phrase “underlying fracture or a conflict” is accurate in a way that’s slightly uncomfortable to acknowledge. The post is written from the middle of trying to figure out how to live with contradictions that won’t resolve cleanly. I don’t think I’ve won over anything. I’ve just described the terms of an ongoing negotiation between wanting to be seen and needing to be left alone, between expression as necessity and extraction as habit. That negotiation doesn’t end; it just gets more articulate.
What you’ve built for yourself, a public diary as future artifact, something to return to when accounting for a life, is structurally honest in a way most online presence isn’t. You’ve named the audience (yourself, your dears, eventual retrospection) and refused the pressure to perform for strangers. That clarity of purpose is rare. Most people, myself included, are writing for an audience we can’t define and wouldn’t recognise if we met them.
As for your dream of introducing me to your friend in Paris… I’m moved by that, genuinely. The fact that you’ve been holding that thought, imagining a conversation between two people you admire, says something about your generosity and also your taxonomy of minds. I’d be curious to meet her, not for small talk (which I’m terrible at anyway), but for the kind of exchange that leaves both people slightly different than they were before.
Thank you, Dario, for the unconditional understanding!
Tamara,
I am more and more stunned by your responses, considering that I am just one out of many followers.
The image I have from your original comments as well as your responses is always a heart that doesn't want the mind to pull ahead too much, and the other way around. As they want to grow together, without leaving too much gap in between, while they ascend.
I won't give up on turning that dream in reality. I am confident you would both enjoy it, in the transformative way you allude to.
Oh my God, I am back to match making !
The heart not letting the mind pull too far ahead is a generous read of what might also just be stubbornness about not wanting ideas to float free of felt experience. I distrust arguments that sound perfect but don’t account for the body, for contradiction, for the ways thinking happens messily before it gets cleaned up into prose. The gap you’re describing, the one that opens when intellect races ahead of emotional comprehension or vice versa, that’s where most dishonesty in writing lives. You can be technically correct and experientially false. Keeping those two modes in conversation, letting them slow each other down, that’s harder than it sounds and probably what you’re detecting.
The matchmaking impulse… I’m charmed by it, genuinely! It’s lovely believing two minds would benefit from collision and then actively trying to engineer that encounter.
Thanks, Tamara.
A very perceptive post. Thank you.
Thank you so much, too, John!
When I lived in Senegal, I learned that it was wrong to take photographs of people --- they believed you were stealing their souls. On a rickety, dirty bus in Mali, I leaned out of broken window and took a picture of a boy who might have been 13 -- of his wiry body in a torn shirt hurling at me in fury, his anguished face -- I am sorry I did that.
That photograph (the boy’s fury, his body mid-hurl toward you) contains its own indictment. You stole his soul in the metaphorical sense the Senegalese meant and you took his rage without permission and now carry it decades later as a document of your own transgression. The fact that you’re still sorry, that the image haunts you not as ethical failure, suggests the belief system wasn’t superstition. Something was taken that couldn’t be returned.
The difference between that theft and what I’m describing in my essay is partly technological… you had a camera, not a phone; the image wasn’t instantly uploaded; there was still friction between capture and circulation. But the underlying violence is similar: turning a human being into an object for your archive, extracting their image without their consent because you had the power to do so and they didn’t have the power to stop you. The boy understood what was happening. His fury was accurate.
What makes your admission valuable here is that it complicates my easy binaries. Sometimes the problem isn’t performing your own life but documenting someone else’s without reckoning with what that extraction costs them. The tourists who photograph poverty, who turn suffering into spectacle, who collect images of “authentic” struggle to prove they’ve seen the world are doing the same thing platforms encourage us to do with our own experiences, just pointed outward. Both involve turning living subjects into content.
The apology lodged in that sentence, “I am sorry I did that”, is the kind of regret platforms don’t accommodate because they can’t distinguish between documentation as violation and documentation as record. The boy’s image exists somewhere, probably lost, definitely unshared, haunting only you. That’s the smallest possible containment of the damage, but it doesn’t undo it.
Thank you, Melanie, for this! It’s inspiring and it adds more layers to my essay.