Ah, “What else is on?” Is the last line of The Truman Show. I couldn’t agree more. I’m a 30 year teacher. These poor kids- their entire lives are a performance. Every thing captured instead of enjoyed.
Maybe I'm the last one to arrive at this party... but I had never thought about how much this is like The Truman Show! Just instead of it being secret and orchestrated by a company, we are doing it to ourselves. The orchestration is different, it's a game show where we all compete to see who gets the most attention, and only those at the top win the prize of monetizing. In a way it's more free, because we choose to do it, but in another it's much less so, because Truman was acting as he pleased, we have the audience in mind.
Oh, good one. I ALWAYS think about the Truman show - isn’t it incredible how the entire movie was based on the “fact” that no one would EVER want to live their entire life on TV? so the entire movie is about everyone around him keeping it a secret that he is being filmed 24/7. Anyone who hasn’t seen this film, watch it asap! It was sooooo ahead of its time. No one could fathom the concept then. Stars Jim Carrey. You’ll love it.
Beautifully written and compelling, as always. I am convinced that a major step in the right direction would be a law forbidding adults to post pictures and videos of minors on public platforms. Children especially have no understanding of what it means to be exposed this way, whereas teenagers might not fully grasp the risks involved. I know child actors have existed for a long time, but acting (which is regulated under labor laws) and having your private life filmed for entertainment are two very different things. I find it terrifying that these adults who obviously have a distorted notion of boundaries are encouraged by monetary incentive to deny their kids the basic human right of privacy, sometimes from the moment they are born.
I can no longer look at even the cutest, most innocent or wholesome looking video on Instagram without asking myself, "Why was somebody recording this? Why was a camera running at this time? Why was this video put on a public account instead of shared privately with friends and family?" If you ask yourself that question, you realize the answer is almost always that the video was either staged or the cameras are constantly running and hope of capturing something to be used for content. It gives you a whole different view of even the cutest, most innocent looking videos
I think it really helps to remember this. Nobody 'just has the camera running'. I think about this particularly with 'break down' videos and 'performative disorders' – someone chose to set up the camera and then cry, or demonstrate their tic etc. It is the opposite of authentic – and indicative of a deep malaise in our culture. It is an extension of what I witnessed working in school – competitive suffering and dysfunction.
Agreed. I started blocking people who post themselves in obviously staged situations, like waking up. Bc unless you’re recording yourself sleeping, you already woke up and staged a camera to capture a fake moment.
This makes me uneasy. That's good; this SHOULD feel uncomfortable. I think reflection on this idea is important for every single one of us who uses social media—not just those with major followings. We're all performing to an extent. Every post, every story, every like and comment is a presentation of some kind. It doesn't matter whether we have 500k followers or 50.
I want to remember the simple joy of ordering a coffee, taking a hike, watching a sunrise, without this nagging thought in the back of my mind: "This is great! How do I make sure everyone else knows it?" I want it to be enough that I know. That my dearest companions know. Our lives don't belong to apps, and they don't belong to followers, and they don't belong to performances.
As a millennial approaching 40 I remember being part of the first wave of young adults who posted everything about their university life and beyond on Facebook. It was initially on laptops but then transitioned to smartphones after graduation. I've never been more unhappy and it started a gradual withdrawal from social media as I approached 30. The last 5 to 10 years I've more or less canned it off, which hasn't been easy. At times it's felt very unpleasant to feel constantly like nobody knows what's going on with me because it's not on social media, old friends not asking me about life because they expect to see it on there and when they don't I just drop off their radar and they engage only with the people they know that do, only in a negative way mind you. But recently... Recently I've discovered the joy of all those moments that bring me joy and happiness, that I can share with my family or just enjoy alone. And the thought that I can enjoy it privately has ignited a spark in me that felt dead for a long time after I disengaged with the content machine. The nagging ache that I have to share an amazing moment nailing something that's felt like a challenge is fading, I'm learning to enjoy it in a deep way internally. I'm discovering who I can trust and confide in for those personal moments. All of this really resonated with me and made me even more confident in the approach I've taken to switch off and go outside, making steps to connecting with the right people about the right things and not feel that need to have everything validated. Sorry for being rambly but I really wanted to share this with you so you know the impact your writing has.
As a teacher, I find it hard to disagree with Freya. I wonder, though, if our schools can be the locus of a solution. Perhaps it's time for schools to present our kids with an alternative to their screen-saturated norm. Perhaps they can be bastions of embodied experience where relationships are formed in the physical world rather than the digital one. Perhaps they can restore that which we've lost. I firmly believe that this is possible; we CAN turn this tide.
Thank you for this. I entirely agree. The rise of ed-tech, its dominance, and the reverence with which it treated by some school staff has undermined a lot of important aspects of both life and learning.
I agree, Lucy. Schools, understandably, responded to the digital revolution by integrating new technologies into the classroom for the sake of “job readiness”. What they failed to account for was the business models of an attention economy, what’s lost when we reduce or remove friction from learning environments, and how those changes affect children’s cognitive and social development.
I think we can learn a lot from these mistakes, which is why I’ve begun to explore these ideas in my writing. A truly responsive education in the 21st century would incorporate a “Pedagogy of Cultivated Attention”, a concept I plan to explore in the coming weeks and months. The cognitive development and attentional capacity of our students need to be central design principles in every classroom and every lesson.
I was a primary school Teacher about 10 years ago, around the time youtube and smartphones had captured everyone's attention. I really noticed some of the children clearly struggling as they'd been up late gaming and watching inappropriate content on devices. When I reached out to ask for solutions on Internet communities the response I got was pretty much "Be more interesting than a YouTuber". It sometimes feels like a herculean task when your job is more than just to keep children scrolling and making money through their attention but ultimately that's what we're competing with. I never found a solution and needed up leaving before things got really bad. Hope that there is a way forward as I worry about my own children's experience at school when they attend.
I’ve heard many teachers make similar suggestions, which ultimately produces a kind of “edutainment” classroom. Lesson activities are shorter (transitions every 10-15 minutes), YouTube becomes a regular resource for curricular content, and gamified tools like Kahoot become engagement crutches.
I’m sorry to hear about your experience, but it’s commonplace in today’s schools, which is why we need to reframe education around metrics that are genuinely responsive to the needs of kids in the 21st century. Their cognitive and social development, and their capacity to sustain attention, should be central to our educational philosophies.
Interesting. I'm well out of that world now and working in data science and AI. Understanding those models (both technical and business) adds another layer on top of all this. I did deliver adult training for a few years in this space and the level of hand holding grown adults needed to engage with learning materials was quite exhausting. A good chunk of them weren't much older than that generation I'd taught back in 2014.
What I truly do not understand is the overweening human need for constant attention, look at me! look at me! look at me! whatever you do please don't stop looking at me!
I think it arises from children today having too much of the wrong sort of attention in early childhood, and not enough of the right kind. If we make caregivers interchangeable, if we undermine the parent child bond with 'wraparound childcare', if we contract out our children to increasingly screen-based schools from dawn until dusk, they do not have the deep relational bonds which given them confidence in who they are – and that they valued and loved. When life is instead based on competition, performance and arms-length transactions, attention becomes the lifeblood.
Also the pervasive view that many parents still have that their children demanding their attention is a bad thing and they then get disciplined for it rather than being given it in the form of play, reading, making, doing etc. There's still a lot of "children should be seen and not heard" mentality from adults that I then see yelling at everyone else for the problems they and their offspring are causing.
Children who are not given the attention and connection they need from the youngest age actually end of being more demanding of attention later. Many parents then can’t cope with this and often end up seeking a ‘diagnosis’ (and yelling about it, as you say) when actually all that is wrong is the absence of a real relationship. This is what I mean when I quote ‘children are not a distraction from work; they are the work’ – and it is the best, most important and productive work that anyone will ever do. Lots of adults have either forgotten this – or would rather not know. We have somehow reached a point where we think children are hobbies – something to be confined to evenings and weekends… and that gets it all wrong.
There’s a hiking trail a few hours from Vancouver that has become Internet famous for its turquoise glacial lakes. On my most recent visit, there was a long queue of people waiting to take their picture standing on a particular log that appears in all the Instagram photos of the park. So it goes everywhere. Hiking is no longer about solitude or enjoying the beauty of nature. It is about making content.
This is all so true, Freya. In fact, as we make a bigger deal than ever of 'authenticity', we become less authentic. Everything is a curated presentation. I was talking earlier today with my 28 yr old son about how people are becoming bit parts in their own lives – prepared to be whatever people need them to be. This is indicative of a lack of any strong, organic sense of identity (rather than pick 'n' mix labels) and no over-arching framework of belief, morality or philosophy to underpin their lives. There is no right and wrong – just an opportunistic 'what works' in the here and now. I wrote recently, on my thirtieth wedding anniversary, about the fact that the proposal was spontaneous, late at night, on a cobbled street under the streetlights, just two people in love – we'd only been together six weeks. We don't have a photo, let alone a selfie – and looking back, it is all the better for that. The most important memories don't need photos – they are still as bright and clear as the day they were made.
Such an insightful piece. Thank you for sharing it. More and more I want to preserve and protect those private moments of life just for me and those that I know and love. They are not for sale or for likes by strangers.
My guess is less than 1% of people live their life to such an extent where their major life choices are driven by click count, but how many people cheapen their life’s beautiful moments by bringing out a phone to take pictures or wondering what their friends will think when they see the upcoming post?
All of life turned into a commodity. What a sad reflection of what people are turning into. After I retired, I closed all my business social media accounts, which left one personal Facebook account to communicate with friends. I could tell this insanity was only getting worse--monetizing life events, that is. Thanks for sounding the alarm. Maybe some can get off their phones long enough to listen.
Wonderful take! I couldn’t agree more. The further I got into the piece, the more I couldn’t help but feel that “participation trophy” culture has contributed in no small way to this phenomenon. This is one reason I don’t post much on the socials (I write this as I’m on a social media “detox”, during which I find myself on Substack more… I think I’m likely to make the change permanent), because my life isn’t a product for others to consume.
I am 21 and have never had any social media accounts. At no point throughout high school and college ( I am an RN) have I ever been tempted to make one. I see the kind of video that you refer to in this article, and I always wonder if I am the only person who doesn't want any part of this. I was very encouraged by reading this article, and fully agree. You so eloquently put words to what I have always felt about social media and its effects. I hope that your work continues to reach and affect more people of my generation. Thank you, Freya
Ah, “What else is on?” Is the last line of The Truman Show. I couldn’t agree more. I’m a 30 year teacher. These poor kids- their entire lives are a performance. Every thing captured instead of enjoyed.
Maybe I'm the last one to arrive at this party... but I had never thought about how much this is like The Truman Show! Just instead of it being secret and orchestrated by a company, we are doing it to ourselves. The orchestration is different, it's a game show where we all compete to see who gets the most attention, and only those at the top win the prize of monetizing. In a way it's more free, because we choose to do it, but in another it's much less so, because Truman was acting as he pleased, we have the audience in mind.
I completely agree with you. I’ve been thinking about Truman Show for a few days now, too.
Oh, good one. I ALWAYS think about the Truman show - isn’t it incredible how the entire movie was based on the “fact” that no one would EVER want to live their entire life on TV? so the entire movie is about everyone around him keeping it a secret that he is being filmed 24/7. Anyone who hasn’t seen this film, watch it asap! It was sooooo ahead of its time. No one could fathom the concept then. Stars Jim Carrey. You’ll love it.
Beautifully written and compelling, as always. I am convinced that a major step in the right direction would be a law forbidding adults to post pictures and videos of minors on public platforms. Children especially have no understanding of what it means to be exposed this way, whereas teenagers might not fully grasp the risks involved. I know child actors have existed for a long time, but acting (which is regulated under labor laws) and having your private life filmed for entertainment are two very different things. I find it terrifying that these adults who obviously have a distorted notion of boundaries are encouraged by monetary incentive to deny their kids the basic human right of privacy, sometimes from the moment they are born.
I can no longer look at even the cutest, most innocent or wholesome looking video on Instagram without asking myself, "Why was somebody recording this? Why was a camera running at this time? Why was this video put on a public account instead of shared privately with friends and family?" If you ask yourself that question, you realize the answer is almost always that the video was either staged or the cameras are constantly running and hope of capturing something to be used for content. It gives you a whole different view of even the cutest, most innocent looking videos
I think it really helps to remember this. Nobody 'just has the camera running'. I think about this particularly with 'break down' videos and 'performative disorders' – someone chose to set up the camera and then cry, or demonstrate their tic etc. It is the opposite of authentic – and indicative of a deep malaise in our culture. It is an extension of what I witnessed working in school – competitive suffering and dysfunction.
Agreed. I started blocking people who post themselves in obviously staged situations, like waking up. Bc unless you’re recording yourself sleeping, you already woke up and staged a camera to capture a fake moment.
This. This is why I don’t record much or take too many photos. And most of my sharing is via text with family and close friends.
Same here. Everything feels so staged and fake these days.
This makes me uneasy. That's good; this SHOULD feel uncomfortable. I think reflection on this idea is important for every single one of us who uses social media—not just those with major followings. We're all performing to an extent. Every post, every story, every like and comment is a presentation of some kind. It doesn't matter whether we have 500k followers or 50.
I want to remember the simple joy of ordering a coffee, taking a hike, watching a sunrise, without this nagging thought in the back of my mind: "This is great! How do I make sure everyone else knows it?" I want it to be enough that I know. That my dearest companions know. Our lives don't belong to apps, and they don't belong to followers, and they don't belong to performances.
Let's step off this stage.
You're already on a stage: have an upvote.
As a millennial approaching 40 I remember being part of the first wave of young adults who posted everything about their university life and beyond on Facebook. It was initially on laptops but then transitioned to smartphones after graduation. I've never been more unhappy and it started a gradual withdrawal from social media as I approached 30. The last 5 to 10 years I've more or less canned it off, which hasn't been easy. At times it's felt very unpleasant to feel constantly like nobody knows what's going on with me because it's not on social media, old friends not asking me about life because they expect to see it on there and when they don't I just drop off their radar and they engage only with the people they know that do, only in a negative way mind you. But recently... Recently I've discovered the joy of all those moments that bring me joy and happiness, that I can share with my family or just enjoy alone. And the thought that I can enjoy it privately has ignited a spark in me that felt dead for a long time after I disengaged with the content machine. The nagging ache that I have to share an amazing moment nailing something that's felt like a challenge is fading, I'm learning to enjoy it in a deep way internally. I'm discovering who I can trust and confide in for those personal moments. All of this really resonated with me and made me even more confident in the approach I've taken to switch off and go outside, making steps to connecting with the right people about the right things and not feel that need to have everything validated. Sorry for being rambly but I really wanted to share this with you so you know the impact your writing has.
Thank you for this. It is a very heartening story!
As a teacher, I find it hard to disagree with Freya. I wonder, though, if our schools can be the locus of a solution. Perhaps it's time for schools to present our kids with an alternative to their screen-saturated norm. Perhaps they can be bastions of embodied experience where relationships are formed in the physical world rather than the digital one. Perhaps they can restore that which we've lost. I firmly believe that this is possible; we CAN turn this tide.
https://walledgardenedu.substack.com/p/the-disappearing-art-of-deep-learning
Thank you for this. I entirely agree. The rise of ed-tech, its dominance, and the reverence with which it treated by some school staff has undermined a lot of important aspects of both life and learning.
I agree, Lucy. Schools, understandably, responded to the digital revolution by integrating new technologies into the classroom for the sake of “job readiness”. What they failed to account for was the business models of an attention economy, what’s lost when we reduce or remove friction from learning environments, and how those changes affect children’s cognitive and social development.
I think we can learn a lot from these mistakes, which is why I’ve begun to explore these ideas in my writing. A truly responsive education in the 21st century would incorporate a “Pedagogy of Cultivated Attention”, a concept I plan to explore in the coming weeks and months. The cognitive development and attentional capacity of our students need to be central design principles in every classroom and every lesson.
I was a primary school Teacher about 10 years ago, around the time youtube and smartphones had captured everyone's attention. I really noticed some of the children clearly struggling as they'd been up late gaming and watching inappropriate content on devices. When I reached out to ask for solutions on Internet communities the response I got was pretty much "Be more interesting than a YouTuber". It sometimes feels like a herculean task when your job is more than just to keep children scrolling and making money through their attention but ultimately that's what we're competing with. I never found a solution and needed up leaving before things got really bad. Hope that there is a way forward as I worry about my own children's experience at school when they attend.
I’ve heard many teachers make similar suggestions, which ultimately produces a kind of “edutainment” classroom. Lesson activities are shorter (transitions every 10-15 minutes), YouTube becomes a regular resource for curricular content, and gamified tools like Kahoot become engagement crutches.
I’m sorry to hear about your experience, but it’s commonplace in today’s schools, which is why we need to reframe education around metrics that are genuinely responsive to the needs of kids in the 21st century. Their cognitive and social development, and their capacity to sustain attention, should be central to our educational philosophies.
Interesting. I'm well out of that world now and working in data science and AI. Understanding those models (both technical and business) adds another layer on top of all this. I did deliver adult training for a few years in this space and the level of hand holding grown adults needed to engage with learning materials was quite exhausting. A good chunk of them weren't much older than that generation I'd taught back in 2014.
Thank you for your essays on this – they are spot on, I think, and very thought-provoking.
What I truly do not understand is the overweening human need for constant attention, look at me! look at me! look at me! whatever you do please don't stop looking at me!
I think it arises from children today having too much of the wrong sort of attention in early childhood, and not enough of the right kind. If we make caregivers interchangeable, if we undermine the parent child bond with 'wraparound childcare', if we contract out our children to increasingly screen-based schools from dawn until dusk, they do not have the deep relational bonds which given them confidence in who they are – and that they valued and loved. When life is instead based on competition, performance and arms-length transactions, attention becomes the lifeblood.
Also the pervasive view that many parents still have that their children demanding their attention is a bad thing and they then get disciplined for it rather than being given it in the form of play, reading, making, doing etc. There's still a lot of "children should be seen and not heard" mentality from adults that I then see yelling at everyone else for the problems they and their offspring are causing.
Children who are not given the attention and connection they need from the youngest age actually end of being more demanding of attention later. Many parents then can’t cope with this and often end up seeking a ‘diagnosis’ (and yelling about it, as you say) when actually all that is wrong is the absence of a real relationship. This is what I mean when I quote ‘children are not a distraction from work; they are the work’ – and it is the best, most important and productive work that anyone will ever do. Lots of adults have either forgotten this – or would rather not know. We have somehow reached a point where we think children are hobbies – something to be confined to evenings and weekends… and that gets it all wrong.
You are 100% correct!
There’s a hiking trail a few hours from Vancouver that has become Internet famous for its turquoise glacial lakes. On my most recent visit, there was a long queue of people waiting to take their picture standing on a particular log that appears in all the Instagram photos of the park. So it goes everywhere. Hiking is no longer about solitude or enjoying the beauty of nature. It is about making content.
You’re never stuck in traffic.
You ARE the traffic.
Upon learning that she was a Replicant, did not Rachel Tyrell in Bladerunner say "I'm not in the business. I am the business."?
This is all so true, Freya. In fact, as we make a bigger deal than ever of 'authenticity', we become less authentic. Everything is a curated presentation. I was talking earlier today with my 28 yr old son about how people are becoming bit parts in their own lives – prepared to be whatever people need them to be. This is indicative of a lack of any strong, organic sense of identity (rather than pick 'n' mix labels) and no over-arching framework of belief, morality or philosophy to underpin their lives. There is no right and wrong – just an opportunistic 'what works' in the here and now. I wrote recently, on my thirtieth wedding anniversary, about the fact that the proposal was spontaneous, late at night, on a cobbled street under the streetlights, just two people in love – we'd only been together six weeks. We don't have a photo, let alone a selfie – and looking back, it is all the better for that. The most important memories don't need photos – they are still as bright and clear as the day they were made.
Such an insightful piece. Thank you for sharing it. More and more I want to preserve and protect those private moments of life just for me and those that I know and love. They are not for sale or for likes by strangers.
My guess is less than 1% of people live their life to such an extent where their major life choices are driven by click count, but how many people cheapen their life’s beautiful moments by bringing out a phone to take pictures or wondering what their friends will think when they see the upcoming post?
All of life turned into a commodity. What a sad reflection of what people are turning into. After I retired, I closed all my business social media accounts, which left one personal Facebook account to communicate with friends. I could tell this insanity was only getting worse--monetizing life events, that is. Thanks for sounding the alarm. Maybe some can get off their phones long enough to listen.
Wonderful take! I couldn’t agree more. The further I got into the piece, the more I couldn’t help but feel that “participation trophy” culture has contributed in no small way to this phenomenon. This is one reason I don’t post much on the socials (I write this as I’m on a social media “detox”, during which I find myself on Substack more… I think I’m likely to make the change permanent), because my life isn’t a product for others to consume.
I am 21 and have never had any social media accounts. At no point throughout high school and college ( I am an RN) have I ever been tempted to make one. I see the kind of video that you refer to in this article, and I always wonder if I am the only person who doesn't want any part of this. I was very encouraged by reading this article, and fully agree. You so eloquently put words to what I have always felt about social media and its effects. I hope that your work continues to reach and affect more people of my generation. Thank you, Freya
I remember when The Truman Show was just a fiction...