While wages are stagnant and low, people are marketing their lives online through self-documentation. But is our obsession with recording everything – from our jobs to the mundane – actually leading us to success?
In 2012, Nathan Jurgenson wrote an article for The Atlantic titled ‘The Facebook Eye’. In it, he warns that we’re in danger of developing a “Facebook Eye”, which he describes as “our brains always looking for a moment where the ephemeral blur of lived experience might best be translated into a Facebook post; one that will draw the most comments and likes”.
It’s been 12 years since the publication of Jurgenson’s article, and it’s clear that we’ve not only developed a ‘Facebook Eye’, but we’ve gone way beyond it. From Instagram and Twitter to Letterboxd, we’re almost always drafting tweets in our heads when we’re experiencing something funny, dramatic or sad, taking pictures of our meals before and after we’ve eaten them, or thinking of witty reviews to write on Letterboxd about the films we’re watching before they’ve even ended. Social media has become so integrated into our day-to-day lives that we don’t even question these intrusive thoughts or the compulsion we have to document our every move and experience.
However, last month, writer Freya India published a viral article in her Substack newsletter titled ‘You Don’t Need To Document Everything’ that questioned it all. The essay was promoted by a video taken on New Year’s Eve in Paris, which showed hundreds of people recording the fireworks and countdown on their phones. Instead of being fully immersed in the excitement of another year coming to a close, the crowd was watching the festivities, or more accurately, recording them through their phones. India writes that people excuse their worrying need to document everything by arguing that they ‘just want to remember things’, but she challenges that assertion: “They will likely never watch that video back, and if they’re posting it online, that’s not for memories; it’s for attention.”
@dailymail EVERYONE on their phones watching the new year countdown 😳😳 #fyp #newyear #countdown #blackmirror #creepy ♬ original sound - Daily Mail
While we record our most intimate moments, from the birth of our children, the funerals of our parents, pregnancy reveals, marriage proposals to telling our partners that we love them for the first time, India contends that social media doesn’t just make us stressed, anxious and depressed, but it also takes so much time from our already very short lives: “I think if this generation is on track to regret anything it will be the time we wasted documenting and editing and filtering and marketing ourselves for social media. Time we will never get back.”
Before reading India’s essay, I contemplated making a TikTok account about my job. Following the success of writers such as Tara Gonzalez, senior fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar, who started her TikTok about her job as a fashion writer at InStyle.com and has now accumulated 58.2K followers on the app, it feels like one of the only options for creatives who want their work to be more well-known, which will in turn, result in more money and opportunities. While sitting in bed, I was mulling over what I would and wouldn’t share online. Of course, I would show my job, but would I also show the world I was in a relationship? People love relationship content. But what if we broke up? Would I have to make one of those announcement videos, telling people I was no longer in a relationship? This thought made me spiral, and India’s essay made my anxiety about it worse.
@maaltoks do you miss being able to walk away from the internet? #learnontiktok ♬ original sound - maalvika
As PhD student and writer Maalvika described in a recent TikTok video that went viral, “We used to say BRB [to our friends when we took a break from texting on the internet], but now we just live here. These little colourful icons are always beckoning, always reachable. The internet is not a place anymore, it’s embedded in all of us.” With this thought in mind, how do we reckon with the fact that social media has become an inescapable force that many believe is their only ticket to success, fame and money, with the reality that it is also taking away valuable time in our lives that we can not get back?
“I know I’m sacrificing my privacy,” TikToker and actress Lohannay Santos tells Dazed. “But I do so because I’m trying to make a life for myself.” Santos has been making lifestyle videos on TikTok for two years. She documents her everyday life, recreates popular TikTok trends and makes romantic videos with her boyfriend, but her most popular videos are the ones where she’s crying and openly discussing her struggles with finding and maintaining a job. Most recently, she went viral for sharing a video of herself on the streets of New York City physically handing out her resume to coffee shops. In the video, she cries, telling the camera, “It’s a little bit embarrassing because I’m applying for minimum wage jobs, and so many of them tell me they’re not hiring. This is not what I expected. I graduated college with two degrees, and I speak three languages.”
“We used to say BRB, but now we just live here. These little colourful icons are always beckoning, always reachable. The internet is not a place anymore, it’s embedded in all of us” – Maalvika
While economists argue that the labour market is strong, job hunting is getting worse in both the US and the UK. In 2023, a survey from staffing agency Insight Global found that full-time workers have applied to an average of 30 jobs, only to receive an average of four callbacks and responses. They also found that 55 per cent of unemployed adults are burned out from searching for a new job, with the statistics being even higher for Gen Z, with 66 per cent complaining of burnout stemming from unsuccessful job hunting.
With the job market becoming harder and harder to navigate, young people rely on social media to lead them to success because it has changed the lives of many others before them. From celebrities like Cardi B and Doja Cat to internet personalities like Emma Chamberlain, Addison Rae and Sabrina Bahsoon (Tube Girl), most young people want to be content creators. “People have realised that this kind of thing [documenting your life and posting online] is a currency,” media and communications graduate Georgia Shakeshaft tells Dazed. “It’s such a lottery what goes viral nowadays. People are just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping it sticks. Because work is so hard (and difficult to find), and being famous feels like a way out.”
@lohannysant I got tear stains on my resume 😔😔😔 #nyc #unemployed ♬ original sound - Lohanny
However, it is becoming increasingly clear that virality isn’t changing the material conditions of many social media creators. In her TikTok video, Lohanny mentions that she just wants to be a TikToker but “can’t be delusional anymore”. A number of creators have shared this same sentiment online, too. Just before the end of 2023, comedian and content creator Brendon Lemon made a TikTok pondering on this thought: “We live in a time where things online are strangely more important and more real than things that happen in real life. But when it comes time to translate the value you’ve made online to real life, the cheques sometimes won’t cash.” He continues: “There’s a gap between virtual reality and reality… I have friends who have over a million followers, and they’re still living paycheck to paycheck. They can barely afford their bills. There has been no other time in history where you could have a million people who have decided to follow you, who watch what you say and do on a daily basis, and still be completely materially broke.”
Lemon ends the video by remarking that everyone online (especially on TikTok) is competing with one another. Everyone wants to be a successful content creator, so they’re posting as much as they can, following the same viral trends and revealing as much about their lives as possible. This oversaturation of content on digital platforms like TikTok has unfortunately resulted in the actions taken by content creators meaning nothing and, thus, resulting in nothing.
“Although many people’s gut reaction is to grab their phone when something interesting happens, the real moment can never be recreated,” Dr Ysabel Gerrard, senior lecturer in digital communication at the University of Sheffield, tells Dazed. “In his 1936 essay, ‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin argued that artwork loses its ‘aura’ whenever it is mechanically reproduced. For Benjamin, artworks divorced from their presence in time and space – in a specific locale where they were originally consumed by their viewer – cannot be replaced if said artwork is reproduced. The same argument could be applied to the personal moments we see people document online: ‘from health scares to mental breakdowns to their first time seeing a baby after it’s born’.”
@brendonfreakinglemon #simulacrum #simulation #jeanbaudrillard #gildedage #capitalismsucks #philosophytiktok ♬ original sound - Midwest Existentialism
At the end of her essay, India advises younger people to stop selling their lives so cheaply to strangers online. However, for young people like Lohanny, documenting her life and struggles online is a way of holding on to hope. After posting her viral video, Lohanny quickly posted another where she hoped for her life to be different a year from now. The caption read, “Posting this so I can duet myself in a year (today is January 29, 2024).” Even in that moment of sadness and vulnerability, Lohanny couldn’t exist in the present. When asked about it, she explained that she posted that video just for herself: “I posted it so I could go to it in the future, with my life being different than it was that day. I hope the future is better. It has to be.”
While social media does take away precious time in our lives, preventing us from fully living in the present, perhaps, as Lohanny’s comments show, the present is just too painful for many to exist in. So, all people are left to do is desperately market themselves into a better future, even if their efforts are futile.