"Should I Post This?"
How social media is stealing your life
When we lament the negative impacts of social media, we often cite things such as how addictive the apps are, how they cause us to despair as we compare our real lives to others’ curated ones, and how they spread misinformation. While all of these things are certainly negative aspects of the various apps to which we now give so much of our time and attention, there is another effect I’ve noticed as a result of my own social media usage that I’d like to identify: the tendency to see everything I do and experience in life as potential content.
Whether I’m out with friends, on vacation, or just at home on the couch with a tissue stuck up my nose, the same thought always crops up: “Should I post this?” (I know, you’re probably thinking, “Why would you ever think to post a picture of yourself on the couch with a tissue up your nose?” but picture this: after some jealousy-inducing posts where I look my best, am posing with throngs of adoring fans after shows, or playing a super-cool gig, I post a simple selfie of myself sitting on the couch in sweats, with messy hair and a tissue up my nose, with the caption, “lol this is the real me.” This type of post is pretty common in my observations — we love to “knock ourselves down” in order to raise ourselves up).
The thought, “Should I post this?” may seem benign, but the more we ask it of ourselves, the less we are living for ourselves. How we perceive each moment becomes drastically altered.
While social media causes particular harm to artists and entrepreneurs, this shift in perception of our existence affects anyone who posts to these apps, even casually (i.e. “Oh I only use it to occasionally post photos of my kids on a private account for family and friends,” or “I only share pictures from when I travel.”) No matter how infrequently you post or what limitations you set, once you share something on the internet from your life, the way you view your experiences going forward will most likely be reframed in the context of how others would perceive them if you were to put photo or video evidence of those experiences online.
Some types of online sharing have more profound impacts than others. For example, if you post to a platform that has a reaction component such as the ability to “like” something (which most social media sites do these days), you’re more at risk of becoming addicted to sharing your life online, due to the dopamine hit that comes when something you post gets a positive reaction.
However, like it or not (pun intended), sharing anything online implies that there is some sort of audience, whether that audience is fifty friends and family members or a million strangers. When we have an audience, we are essentially being observed, and being observed changes our behavior — and even if the moment gets captured ahead of time and then shared with an audience at a later point, the observer effect is still at play, since in that moment one might be imagining what others will think once the evidence of it is posted at a later time.
The Observer Effect is certainly not an original idea of mine, and in fact is a widely studied concept across many fields including in psychology and even physics — I’m not going to pretend to really understand the physics one since science is like, really confusing to me, but I think it has something to do with an experiment showing how electrons change their behavior based on whether or not they’re being observed — when observed they act like waves and when unobserved they act like particles. Fascinating stuff, because like how do freaking electrons know!? And what does a particle even act like? ANYWAY…
As we act differently while being observed (or while planning on our moments being observed at a later time), we also stop experiencing what it feels like to simply live for ourselves in the moment.
You may be thinking, “But I’ve stopped posting as much” or “I don’t always decide to post things, sometimes I keep stuff for just me” and therefore you are again living for yourself. Unfortunately, even if you’re consciously deciding in any given moment not to post something, the damage has already been done. The moment is already ruined by the internal negotiations regarding what you will or will not post, and by the active restraint it might take to resist posting when you have done so more regularly in the past.
The hours of scrolling on social media each day have taken up our time and robbed us of many moments of stillness, self-reflection, and pontification. But to understand the full negative impact using this technology has on us, we must also consider the times when we’re not using it. Often, when I’m not scrolling, I think about whatever I’m doing as if others were watching, or could be watching if I wanted them to be. Anything and everything I do is now potential content.
And text-based apps aren’t much better, even if they lend themselves more to original thought and less to sharing actual moments from your life. Back when I used to post regularly to The App Formerly Known As Twitter, I would punctuate every little idea I had with, “Should I tweet that?” Not only did this intrusive thought curtail how deeply I went into any original idea — since I knew it needed to stay under 280 characters — it also reframed all of my own thoughts as potential content. If this doesn’t sound dystopian to you, then maybe you should come over to my place and ease my anxiety with your rose-colored view of the world.
As the question, “Should I post this?” continues to pop up, I find my life is no longer for me — it’s for some sort of “self” that I’m feeding, like a Tamagatchi Pet you digitally keep alive. But it’s not for the actual me. In fact — at the risk of sounding overly dramatic — I’m losing sight of who “me” even is.
It’s not just our personal data and our time being stolen by these tech companies, it’s also our very existence.
Thank you for reading, and welcome to anyone who is new to my Substack! In addition to receiving essays, subscribing is the best way to stay up-to-date on all I’m doing and everywhere I’ll be, so thanks for being here. Speaking of which:
I’m on tour in 2025!
I’ll be coming to the Cincinnati area (technically Dayton KY but I’ve been instructed to promote it as Cincinnati because I guess that means more to more people? Sorry to anyone from Dayton!), Stanford and Sonoma CA, Washington DC, Royal Oak MI, and Gettysburg PA! Also I’m doing a show in Brooklyn, NY on February 5th! Tickets to that can be found here and all tickets can be found at isabelhagen.com/shows
I was also featured in the New York Times recently regarding my essay Social Media is Depriving Artists. Read the Times article here and my original piece here :)
And lastly, Happy New Year! It’s almost “Happy new year lol can we even still say that?” season!
It sounds like you probably already have your finger on this pulse, but have you read any Jonathan Haidt?