There’s a specific feeling I used to get after posting something. A kind of low buzz of anticipation. I’d put my phone down, pick it up again thirty seconds later, put it down, pick it up. Checking. Just to see if anyone had responded or liked it yet. If anyone had confirmed that the thing I’d experienced was worth experiencing.
I told myself this was normal. Everyone does it. It’s just how things work now.
But I started paying attention to what was actually happening. I’d have a good meal and immediately think about how to photograph it. I’d be somewhere beautiful and spend half the time figuring out the caption. I’d have a feeling—real, specific, mine—and immediately start translating it into something shareable, something that would land well, something the algorithm might like.
At some point, the living and the documenting had gotten so tangled that I couldn’t tell which one I was doing.
That’s when I stopped. Here’s what I figured out on the other side.
I used to post things and then wait to see how people felt about them
Not consciously. I didn’t sit there thinking I’m going to let these strangers tell me how to feel about my own life. But that was the mechanism. I’d share something and then hold it slightly at arm’s length until the response came in. If the response was good, the thing was good. If nobody cared, the thing was quietly downgraded in my memory.
I only noticed this when I started noticing how I felt after posting something that didn’t land. Not hurt exactly. More like—deflated. Like the experience had been held up for review and returned with a lower rating than expected. Which meant I was, on some level, outsourcing the rating. Handing something real over to a system designed to reward whatever happens to go viral that week and waiting for it to tell me whether my life was good.
That’s a strange thing to do with your life. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to see it clearly.
The version of my life I shared online was never really my life
It was a selected, filtered, timed, captioned version. The angles that worked. The moments that translated. The feelings that fit inside a caption without requiring too much explanation.
The actual life was messier, quieter, and more specific than that. The actual life had bad lighting, unresolved conversations, and entire weeks that didn’t produce a single postable moment. The actual life had a lot of time that looked like nothing from the outside—sitting, reading, thinking, driving, existing—and felt like everything from the inside.
None of that made it online. What made it online was the highlight reel. And after enough time of sharing only the highlight reel, I started to notice that I was losing track of the actual life. The unposted version. The one that didn’t have an audience and, therefore, in some quiet way, I hadn’t examined, felt slightly less real.
I realized I was curating instead of living
The clearest version of this: I was at a concert. A good one. Music I actually loved, with someone I actually liked. And I spent the first three songs trying to get a video that captured the atmosphere. Not for any particular reason. Not because anyone had asked. Just because—that’s what you do. You document it so it happened properly.
Eventually, I put my phone in my pocket and just stood there. And the concert was completely different. I was in it instead of behind it. I wasn’t collecting an asset. I was just there, in the room, present in a way I hadn’t been for the first three songs.
That’s when it clicked. The documentation had become a reflex so automatic that I’d stopped noticing that it was pulling me out of my own experiences. I wasn’t living and then sharing. I was living for the share. And those are very different things.
I was making choices based on aesthetics, not out of desire
This one is harder to describe, but it might be the most important.
There were choices I was making—where to go, what to do, what to wear, who to spend time with—that were being quietly shaped by how they’d look. Not dramatically. Just a background calculation running underneath all the other calculations. Would this photograph well? Would this make a good story? Would this be the kind of thing that gets engagement or the kind that disappears?
Once I noticed that calculation, I couldn’t unnotice it. It was everywhere. And it was making me boring. Not to other people—to myself. Because I was defaulting toward the legible and the photogenic and the shareable, and away from the strange and the private and the hard to explain. Which is where most of the actually interesting things in my life live.
Editing your life for an audience before you’ve lived it means the audience is shaping the life. And I didn’t want strangers shaping my life. I didn’t even particularly like most of them.
I confused being seen with being known
Having a lot of people look at your life is not the same as having anyone understand it. Having followers is not the same as having people who care about you. Having engagement is not the same as having connection.
I knew this intellectually. But I’d let the mechanisms of social media blur it anyway. The likes felt like approval. The comments felt like recognition. The followers felt like—something. Evidence that I was visible. That I existed in a way other people could confirm.
What I actually wanted, underneath all of that, was to be known. By specific people. In a real way. Not the version I’d curated and captioned and posted at optimal times for maximum reach. The actual version. The one that has contradictions and bad moods and opinions that don’t fit neatly into a caption and entire months that don’t have a thesis.
That version was never going online. It was too slow, too complicated, too resistant to the kind of compression that social media requires. And so the people who were watching my life—sometimes thousands of them—were watching something that was adjacent to me but not quite me. A simplified, improved, more photogenic version. Presented with confidence. Received as real.
The moments I stopped photographing became the ones I actually remember
I have very clear memories of a dinner a few years ago. Nothing special by any measurable standard—a small apartment, cheap wine, four people I love, a conversation that went somewhere real. Nobody photographed it. Nobody posted it. It didn’t happen for any audience.
I remember it better than most of the documented moments from that same period. Better than the trips and the events and the things I have photos of. Because I was entirely in it. There was no split attention, no documentation impulse, no translation into caption. Just the thing itself, landing fully, without being interrupted.
That keeps happening now that I’ve stopped reaching for my phone. The unrecorded moments turn out to be the ones that stay. The ones that accumulate into something that actually feels like a life rather than a collection of content. I didn’t expect that. I thought the undocumented life would feel smaller. It feels larger, actually. More real. More mine.
I don’t miss the validation—I miss thinking I needed it
This is the strange part. I thought stopping would feel like deprivation. Like going without something necessary. What it actually felt like was putting down a weight I’d been carrying so long I’d forgotten it was heavy.
The validation I was getting was never that satisfying anyway. It was brief and required constant renewal. Good numbers one day meant you needed good numbers the next day. There was no accumulation. You couldn’t get enough and then stop. The mechanism was designed to keep you coming back, which meant it was designed to never be enough.
What I miss—not the validation itself, but the period when I thought I needed it—is hard to explain. It’s something like missing being younger. When the stakes felt lower because I didn’t understand them yet. When the approval of strangers felt like it meant something because I hadn’t yet figured out that it didn’t.
I don’t want that back. But I notice its absence sometimes. The simplicity of thinking that the number of likes was information about the quality of your life. It wasn’t. But believing it was made things feel more legible. More measurable. And measurement, even fake measurement, is a kind of comfort.
Now I’m just living my life without the measurement. And it turns out the life is fine without it. Better, actually. More mine.
Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our “As Told to Bolde” series where we share personal stories from individuals we have interviewed or surveyed. For more information on how we create content, please review our Editorial Policy.
