When Everything Became Content
How we stopped living moments and started packaging them
This is one of those pieces that ties together a lot of things I’ve written about in the Off the Record series over the past few months. The loneliness epidemic.1 The death of the third place.2 Why no one knows how to be bored anymore.3 Why everyone became a brand.4 Why everyone got mean.5 All of these things, although different on the surface, point back to the same underlying issue:
We are no longer just experiencing life.
We are constantly thinking about how life will look once it’s posted online.
And I think that’s changing us in ways we don’t fully understand yet.
You go to a concert now, and half the crowd is watching the performance through their phone screen because they’re recording instead of actually being there. You go on vacation, and people spend more time trying to get the perfect picture than taking in the scenery around them. You go out to dinner, and before anyone takes a bite, there’s a ten-minute photoshoot happening over the appetizers because everyone is trying to find the perfect angle, the perfect lighting, the perfect aesthetic. At some point, your pasta is cold and your fries taste like cardboard, but hey, at least Instagram got fed first.
And don’t even get me started on groups of friends hanging out together.
Everyone is on their damn phone.
Somewhere along the way, life stopped being about being lived and started being about being documented.
Every moment now feels like it exists with an invisible audience standing just over our shoulder. We’re constantly thinking: should I post this? Would this make a good story? Is this aesthetic enough? Is this funny enough? Is this going to get engagement?
And what’s wild is that many of us don’t even realize we’re doing it anymore because it has become so normalized.
There’s this saying that young people use all the time now: “pics or it didn’t happen.”
Really?
Did a sunset only matter if other people saw that you saw it?
Did your vacation only matter if it became content afterward?
Because I’ve noticed something interesting in my own life. I go on these trips with friends, we have incredible experiences, we laugh until we can’t breathe, we tell ridiculous stories, we stay out too late, we eat amazing food, we wander around places we’ve never been before. Then I come home, someone asks me to show them pictures, and I open my camera roll only to realize I barely took any.
Instead, my phone is full of screenshots. Random reminders. Pictures of books I want to buy later. Notes for articles. Pictures of my dog.
And part of me thinks, damn, one day I’m going to wish I had more pictures of these moments.
But another part of me realizes something else: I remember these experiences vividly because I was actually there for them.
I wasn’t distracted trying to capture them perfectly.
I was just living them.
That matters.
Now, to be clear, this is not me saying technology is evil or that taking photos is bad. Quite honestly, we’re lucky to live in a time where we can document memories so easily. I love looking back at old pictures. I love when friends upload shared albums from trips because, quite frankly, thank God someone remembered to take photos. Otherwise my poor mother would ask me to send vacation pictures and I’d have absolutely nothing except screenshots and a blurry picture of a sandwich I thought looked interesting.
That’s not the problem.
The problem is when documenting the moment becomes more important than experiencing it.
And increasingly, that’s exactly what’s happening.
You see it everywhere.
At the gym, people spend more time setting up tripods than working out. At concerts, phones block the entire stage. At dinner, people curate the table before they taste the food. In relationships, couples are obsessed with building a perfect online image of their love while the actual relationship quietly deteriorates behind the scenes.
And let me tell you something from experience: the people whose relationships look the happiest online are often the ones struggling the most in real life.
Because once relationships become content, they stop being private. They stop belonging to the people inside them and start existing for public consumption.
And I think that’s incredibly dangerous.
We are living through cameras now instead of through our own eyes.
Even authenticity has become performative.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how everyone has become a brand, and this is an extension of that same problem. Now we have “casual” photo dumps that are carefully curated. We have vulnerability optimized for engagement. We have people strategically trying to appear unfiltered.
Authenticity has a content strategy now.
And honestly? What the fuck is going on?
I see people posting videos of themselves crying online and I genuinely cannot process it. A tragedy happens and within minutes the phones come out. Someone dies, someone gets divorced, a horrible event happens somewhere in the world, and immediately everyone rushes online to perform their reaction publicly.
Not privately. Publicly.
Trauma becomes discourse immediately.
People don’t sit with things anymore. They don’t reflect. They don’t process. They react.
Another school shooting happens and everyone posts the same graphics, the same stories, the same outrage, and then within 48 hours we collectively move on to the next thing. Activism has become aestheticized.6 Grief has become content. Even outrage has become performance.
And I’m not saying this to judge people.
I’m saying this because I observe it constantly, and if we’re honest, most of us participate in it to some degree.
That’s the uncomfortable part.
We are no longer fully present in our own lives.
Our phones interrupt everything. Conversations. Meals. Vacations. Silence. Reflection. Even writing this piece, my email has dinged repeatedly, my phone has buzzed, notifications have popped up on every screen around me. The modern world constantly pulls us away from the moment we’re actually in.
And because of that, we don’t really remember moments anymore.
We archive them.
That’s different.
A memory is lived.
Content is packaged.
And the psychological consequences of all this are enormous. Scholars like Jonathan Haidt and many others have written extensively about what constant digital stimulation is doing to us. Anxiety is through the roof. Depression is everywhere. People are exhausted from comparison.
On LinkedIn, everyone else seems more successful than you.
On Instagram, everyone else seems happier than you.
Someone is getting married. Someone bought a house. Someone lost weight. Someone got promoted. Someone is traveling. Someone is running marathons. Someone seems to have the perfect life.
And meanwhile you’re sitting there wondering why your own life suddenly feels inadequate by comparison.
Then there’s the inability to rest.
We are constantly stimulated. Constantly consuming. Constantly checking. Constantly refreshing. Ding. Buzz. Notification. Repeat.
And perhaps saddest of all, we’ve lost the ability to enjoy things quietly.
People genuinely feel like experiences matter less unless other people witness them.
And that, to me, is one of the clearest signs that something has gone wrong culturally.
Because some things are supposed to belong only to you.
Not everything needs to become content.
Not every dinner needs a photo.
Not every moment needs a post.
Not every thought needs to become discourse.
Some joy should remain private.
Some experiences should exist only in memory.
Some moments should belong only to the people who were actually there.
And maybe that’s the quiet rebellion now.
Going somewhere without announcing it.
Having a beautiful moment without posting it.
Taking fewer pictures and making stronger memories.
Reclaiming life from performance.
Because at the end of the day, the best parts of being human were never meant to be optimized for engagement.
They were meant to be lived.