Stop Performing
My best friend is obsessed with social media. Genuinely obsessed. When she’s not sleeping, showering, or beating me up for stealing her chocolate, she’s on her phone swiping through apps. But she doesn’t just want to do it herself—she wants me to do it too.
You should try Snapchat,
she says. So I open it and watch some twenty-year-old film themselves at a party instead of being there. For three minutes. Who wants to follow that? Get on Instagram,
she says. I see the same sunset photo twenty times. Tweet more,
she says. I read a joke I laughed at three years ago, now with hundreds of retweets. I want to die.
I sound like an old man when I talk about the early internet. But when I started blogging in 2002, there were maybe twenty interesting people to follow. Real people, doing their thing, not performing. Sure, half of them turned out to be idiots in person, but it was manageable. A small group. Now the entire world is trying to become famous. Facebook rants, Twitch streams, TikToks, YouTube videos, podcasts. Everyone’s got a platform and everyone thinks they’re going to be the next big thing.
Companies sold us the dream: share your life and become a celebrity. Not just stay in touch with friends—actually become someone. Actually make money. Actually matter. I helped make this happen. I showed people how to do it, normalized the idea that you have to broadcast yourself to count.
But nobody says the obvious thing: you’re boring. Most of you are genuinely fucking boring. You have nothing interesting to say, nothing unique to offer. I wouldn’t listen to you talk for thirty seconds without wanting to leave.
So you do what makes sense—you fake it. You retake the same selfie until it looks right. You edit your photos through beauty apps. You post about your mundane life and wait for validation from strangers. You know it’s all a performance, all a lie, but the hope that this time someone will care keeps you doing it. Every app. Every filter. Every carefully crafted caption.
The worst part is you’re all doing exactly the same thing. Same selfies, same filters, same boring observations, competing for the same attention from an algorithm that doesn’t care about any of you. The companies running these apps love it because every second you spend trying to become famous is money in their pocket.
I’ve been blogging for twenty years. I watched the internet go from this weird, wild place where actual interesting people could find each other, to a stage where everyone’s performing and nobody’s really present. It’s exhausting just watching it.
My friend keeps saying I’d be good at it, that I should get on Snapchat or Instagram or whatever’s next. Maybe I would be good at it. But I don’t want to perform my life for strangers. I don’t want my existence optimized for engagement. I don’t want to measure myself against an algorithm.
If you want to know what I’m up to, ask. If you want to hang out, come over. Everything else is just noise. I’m living my actual life, not filming it.