The Year I Stopped Performing Happiness on Social Media

I had a social media presence that I had been building since I was 22 and that by 27, working in Chennai, had accumulated a few thousand followers who knew me through the specific version of my life that I had been choosing to share.

The version was not fabricated - everything in it had happened. It was the selection that made it misleading: the photographs that had required twelve attempts to produce the one that was posted, the captions that described experiences I had not quite had in the way the captions described them, the consistent presentation of a life that was engaged and purposeful and visually coherent in ways my actual life was not, for extended periods, any of those things.

I had not started the curation deliberately. It had accumulated through the same mechanism that most social media curation does - the feedback loop of engagement made the polished version more rewarding to post than the honest one.

By 27 I was spending significant time and cognitive energy on the production of a version of my life that was exhausting to maintain and that was producing, in exchange for its maintenance, a set of relationships I could not be honest within because the relationship was built on the curated version.

I stopped not with any grand intention but because a difficult period made the gap between the presented version and the real one too wide to sustain without feeling dishonest in a way I could not continue.

I posted something that was real and unpolished and received responses that were qualitatively different from anything the curated version had produced - more personal, more honest, from people who seemed to be reaching toward something rather than admiring something. The performance had been preventing the connection it was supposed to create.

I have posted differently since then. The following is smaller. What I have with the people who are in it is more real.