Living or Performing: When Are We Truly Ourselves?
Image Courtesy: Pinterest
Everything feels like a performance these days. You open your phone, and there it is—a feed full of carefully framed smiles, curated heartbreaks, and perfectly messy bedrooms staged to look effortless. Scroll long enough, and you wonder: are we living our lives or just performing them? Every shared moment seems calibrated for consumption. We’re not just existing; we’re packaging ourselves—thoughts, emotions, breakfasts, breakdowns—into neatly digestible pieces for someone else’s screen. Happiness is posed, sadness is aestheticized, and even authenticity has a filter now.
We perform for followers, friends, and strangers we’ll never meet. It’s a strange theater where everyone is an actor, director, and audience member simultaneously. Scroll through timelines, and you’ll find a gallery of curated selves: joy stretched wide for the camera, vulnerability presented with the proper lighting, and spontaneity rehearsed until it looks natural. The scariest part is how easy it becomes. Pretending morphs into habit. The mask isn’t something you put on anymore, it’s something you forget you’re wearing.
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Vulnerability has become its own kind of currency. Oversharing is branded as connection, and struggle gets repackaged into content that can be liked, commented on, or shared. There’s a dopamine rush in being seen—even if what’s being seen is just a well-crafted version of messiness. Measuring worth in metrics is tempting: How many people saved that post? How many strangers said, “You’re so real for this?” Somewhere along the way, expression turns into exhibition. Breathing becomes another chance to perform. What was meant to be cathartic becomes calculated. Heartbreak isn’t just something to feel—it’s something to post about. Grainy mirror selfies with moody captions and playlists made for people you’ll never mention by name. Even exhaustion gets romanticized: "Look at me, unraveling—but make it pretty." Detachment becomes its own performance: coffee cups photographed next to half-read books, captions that say "I don’t care," but took thirty minutes to phrase just right. We mine ourselves for content, selling off fragments we think will resonate. The more palatable the version, the more likely it is to be seen.
But what’s the cost? When everything is staged for an audience—when every laugh, cry, and fleeting glance is filtered through the question of how it will be perceived—moments stop belonging to us. Experiences lose their weight when their value hinges on visibility. If it isn’t seen, did it really happen? The thought sits heavy, like an echo that won’t quiet. There’s a pull toward being witnessed, toward turning private feelings into public proof. To live unnoticed feels like disappearing. You start to wonder if memory holds less meaning when there’s no photo to revisit, no post to scroll back to, and no digital footprint to mark it happened.
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What does it mean to exist beyond the lens? Not to disappear but to inhabit a space no one can peer into. There’s discomfort in that invisibility, in doing something meaningful without applause or acknowledgment. But there’s also a quiet relief in not performing, in resisting the urge to make yourself consumable. Not everything has to be captured, captioned, or validated. Some things can simply be yours—unspectacular, unrecorded, yet fully alive.
Strike Out,
Writer: Kayla Perez-Fontaine
Editor: Dani Hernandez
Graphic Designer: Cole Martucci
Tallahassee