We Are Living in the Eternal Truman Show

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.

We feel empty when we don’t share as if there’s a missing piece of the equation. Put simply — we’re stuck in a Luciferian hell loop of dopamine-fueled documentation. It’s experience as raw material, memories becoming B-roll inventory.

And all of this performed authenticity has made genuine moments damn near extinct. That’s not hyperbole — search any social platform for the very word “authentic” to see how thoroughly it has been coopted as nothing more than a marketing term. Being real has become just another form of being fake, often for profit, and always to the point of exhaustion.

Content creation is unpaid labor for most people, perpetuating the content slop pipeline. But there’s a tiny voice in the back of their minds that says if they document enough of their experiences, if they validate enough of them (“if it wasn’t posted, did it even happen?”), maybe they, too, will enter the enlightened ranks of the paid influencers. But the burden of maintaining that digital relevance is crushing. Generation Upload doesn’t know how to be offline.

There’s a new social contract at work here. Everyone’s a broadcaster. Attention is currency. And it’s taking its toll.

The signs of the breaking point are everywhere. The digital fatigue. The rise of digital sabbaticals. The folks younger than me toting flip phones and sketchbooks instead of swiping and scrolling, searching for meaning and freedom in the unshared.

But it might be too late for the rest of us, our society, and our families. Can enough of us still experience without performing?

Ask yourself — what was your last truly private moment? Not private as a result of shame or secrecy, private because it didn’t need anything more than you and a loved one, you and a sunrise, you and a damn good book?

Ask yourself that question.

And if you’re not happy with the answer, don’t hide from it. Face it head-on.

Because if we can’t find a way to do that, all of us, in our way, we’ll be no better than that Instagram Momfluencer (and yes, apparently that’s a word) beaming at the camera while our kids beg us to stop.