We Are Living in the Eternal Truman Show

Social Media Is a Meat Grinder. And Your Life Is the Raw Material.

I broke one of my personal rules today and spent half an hour or so scrolling through Instagram. Most of the content was largely innocuous, if almost entirely mindless. But one video stood out: a blonde-haired influencer in a broad-brimmed hat laughed from a straight-to-camera video with her 4-year-old child. The joke? The child kept asking their parent to stop recording. It was pitched as something cute. Something relatable. Kids say the darnedest things, etc.

But it was one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen.

Filming our kids is nothing new. I’ll grant that. But the 1990s home videos didn’t have much in common with the influencer fare of today. Apart from anything else, those shaky hand-held cameras were pulled out at family gatherings with intention. The endless feed of Instagram content is just pure compulsion. We’ve become a species that barely knows how to experience the world without broadcasting.

We’re both relentless consumers and the relentlessly consumed. We’ve presided over the death of our private moments, as social validation has become our new oxygen. We’ve started changing and reshaping our behavior to meet the desires of the invisible audience that’s always watching.