Living with an Audience

We want to be liked. We want to be admired. We want people to think highly of us. We want to be more attractive, have more money, more friends, more likes. We want to be wanted. We crave validation more than we realize. Because of this, we find ourselves stuck in this loop of comparing strangers' curated little moments, glimpses of their lives. with the entirety of our own. But that isn’t fair. Our lives are messy, ugly, imperfect. Full of misfires, wasted opportunities, overreactions, and things we wish we could do over. But these glimpses into other people’s lives, these snapshots of our most well-lit cinematic moments, are what we tell the world we are.

We put together portfolios of precisely posed pictures that we convince the rest of the world are our lives. We create this porcelain mask of ourselves that we flaunt and polish just to take it off at the end of the day and compare it to our peers. I’m no advocate for this “Glued to their screens” narrative that our parents and their favorite Facebook artists will try to push onto you. I offer only another curated, polished moment. An edited, revised, reviewed, and rewritten word of warning. Stop performing. Not permanently, but if only for a moment I ask you to think back to the reason we do this. We want to be liked.

To quote Bo Burnham, a great performer and a better writer, “Social media is the market's answer to a generation that demanded to perform... it’s performer and audience melded together. What do we want more than to lie in our bed at the end of the day and just watch our life as a satisfied audience member?” How much has drunk you enjoyed those moments that you captured earlier in the night? How much did you enjoy that hit of dopamine as followers validated those moment with digital hearts? Consider only this. Did capturing that moment make it better? Maybe it did. Maybe it made it worse. Maybe it had no bearing on it whatsoever. But there are those among us who, if they could, would wish away all of this "toxic technology," reminiscing and romanticizing a different version of the world where everyone is dying to talk to strangers on the subway.

We like to pretend that before our phones we treated one another with a deep insatiable curiosity, constantly ready to engage someone new in deep conversation. Some of us sincerely believe that technology has made the world more of a mess, that the children growing up with iPad predispositions are doomed to never understand how to socialize. The world continuously gets smaller, more accessible, and in my opinion, more understanding. Some of the most spectacular things are the product of this "problem" of technology and social media. A soldier overseas happily video chatting with their children, excited just to hear their voices. Old friends reconnecting via Facebook catching up. Strangers whose lives revolve around music connect through a mutual love of their favorite artists. A young man with nothing but an opinion and a love of writing capturing a reader's valuable attention and growing as a writer in the process. Social media is nothing but a still relatively new medium for us to inhabit, not the enemy, but certainly not real life.

I ask you to consider leaving your audience out of your mental health, and doing so consciously. We vent to strangers, billboarding our struggles and emotions, desperate to be (or be with) these bikini clad “entrepreneurs” who travel endlessly, promoting these tummy-tea solutions to our insecurities. Their moments drinking their iced coffees are their performance. You need not be them. You need not be their version of beautiful. You don’t have to share every moment of your life. You don’t need to compare your face to their masks. You don’t need to compare your life to their moments. But you don't need to rid yourself completely of these new means of connection. Leave your mask in wardrobe and live your life without the audience. Perform because you want to. Not because it’s expected of you.