Content-Life Balance

The dangers of documenting yourself

Swans Reflecting Elephants by Salvador Dalí, 1937

A lot of people say that if you’re young and starting to make stuff online, you should document your life. Instead of trying to create content, just show your work. Share your notes.

But the problem I’ve found with this prescription is that when you know you’re going to AirDrop your life to the public, the way you live will be unconsciously warped.

It’s kind of like listening to music in the car: whenever I roll down the windows, I suddenly start to feel self-conscious. Before I learned how to be more comfortable with my true self, I would crank down the volume if I knew someone could hear my music of choice: Beethoven’s Piano Concertos. Then I’d swap the song to something more normal, like Rick Ross telling a stripper to pass him some cocaine. 

Sure, this self-judgment passes; now I blast Beethoven and don’t give a damn. But this doesn’t deny that something inside of us shifts when we know we’re being watched.

I’m worried that the lives of writers and content creators like myself have been invisibly infected by an incessant pressure to post online. I’m worried that keeping people in the loop with my next intellectual poop skews some sacred part of my own personal development. In other words, I’m worried that I suffer from a lack of Content-Life Balance.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve seen how the Internet gives birth to beautiful lives. The last 16 months of my life rests on one crappy cold email. Without pouncing on the opportunities online, I wouldn’t have dropped out of college in Boulder, discovered my home in Austin, or met many of my dream mentors and best friends. I’m not discounting any of that.

Instead, what I am saying is that privacy and secrecy have been sucked out of our world, and I want to explore the effects.

An Apartment Without Walls

The technological equivalent of rolling down the car windows came on the scene decades before social media. Its name was photography.

In his seminal 1964 book Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan wrote that photography created a new sort of self-consciousness and relationship with ourselves. He theorized that people’s anxiety about tidying up their homes was a phenomenon that came from the camera.

As he observed:

“By the same token, the complete transformation of human sense-awareness by this form involves a development of self-consciousness that alters facial expression and cosmetic makeup as immediately as it does our bodily stance, in public or private … It is not too much to say, therefore, that if outer posture is affected by the photograph, so with our inner postures and the dialogue with ourselves. The age of Freud and Jung is, above all, the age of the photograph, the age of the full gamut of self-critical attitudes.”

Through this lens, social media is to photography what coffee is to green tea—it hits harder. Even if you write online or create “educational” vlogs, documenting your life may be no different than a Starbucks girl posing perfectly for the Gram. 

Tim Ferriss commonly asks himself: “What would you do if you were the only person in the world?” As much as I adore this question, I can’t help but think that my own answer has historically been tainted by the Twitter tribe.

I have a theory that if you feel like you always need to keep people “up to date,” content controls your life—not the reverse. Because instead of actually living, you merely think about how you should live. And as we saw with Beethoven in the car, this definition of living will likely be distorted—even if you think you’re really being yourself. It’s almost as if these self-consciousness contraptions teleport us into a parallel universe beyond our conscious detection. As a result, the entire concept of the self is skewed; content made us more than we made it.

Maybe I’m exaggerating this effect. Maybe it’s just me. Although I’m stubborn, I’m also only 22 years old. As a malleable young person, something I’ve seen is that putting myself online is scary. Not just because I’m seen, but because I’m constantly seen—as if I lived in an apartment without walls. It can be sneakily soul-sucking if you’re always thinking about sharing something with the world because you can never savor the secrecy of your own solitude.

As

Luke Burgis

reflected:

“Perhaps a controversial take, but: the ‘X months ago I was X, and now I am Y’ posts do a massive disservice to reality, and ultimately to hope, through the Contentization of something that must be undergone in the solitude of one's own personhood. You think there is a formula and a recipe and a 5 step program, and it all sounds nice, until you have to confront the reality of your own circumstances.”

I’m not saying we shouldn’t have an online presence, either. McLuhan famously said that media are the extensions of man, and by extending parts of ourselves into the whole wide world, we are the first humans in history with the chance to connect with like-minded people in Calgary, Denver, and Granada. All in the same day. Without the Internet, I wouldn’t have found the others; the others who read Homer, go on sunrise runs, and distrust the TV.

Still though, I believe that in our public, pants-down world, we all need a little privacy and room to roam on our own. I’m not so sure that people should always be able to see the underwear and private parts of our minds—especially young people like me. 

As British journalist Colin McDowell wrote in The Anatomy of Fashion: “Many would feel that, while the naked body can frequently be attractive, to be truly sexy it needs clothes.”

Creating vs. Living

By Emily Flake, published by The New Yorker, 2023

One of my online friends has made YouTube videos for 16 years. At an outdoor October dinner in Austin, she told me that it had been 334 days since she posted her last video. As she explained: “Sometimes, you have to separate creating and living and just give yourself some space to grow as your own person.”¹

Although my friend is in a later phase of her life and career, she still helped me voice the dissonance I’ve observed between writing and living. At times, I’ve felt like posting online all the time subtracted from living a full life. At times, I’ve filtered all of my actions through writing, wondering if my life would make it into a future Tweet or essay. Content? Even something as simple as going hiking at Lake Isabel in the Indian Peaks Wilderness.

This I regret. I often worry that our generation is so consumed with capturing every waking moment that we miss out on every waking moment.

As the pseudonymous writer

BONESAW

so perfectly said:

“Overwhelmingly frustrating that if you write about life, it’s as if you are taking a snapshot of experience. During that time there’s an inevitable plateau in which you’re not really living it — just trying to keep it stagnant and steady enough to write on your experience. One year off all social media will fill you with enough stories, insights, and thoughts to be able to write for 10 years. But the inverse is never true, and you can always tell when content creators could easily improve their content by logging off for a long time.”

In my own defense, I must say: for the last two years, my mission was to get ~100 writing reps in to see if I wanted to do it for an actual career. By shipping something most weeks, I built some solid muscle mass, like the beefy curve of a bicep. I taught myself the basics of writing well by, well, writing. And I’m thrilled that I did: in a world with no nanosecond to think, writing helped me unatrophy the very muscles I believe we need to thrive in our time.

But now, I’m starting to feel the pull of privacy. Or at least, a more private method of writing in public that gives me more Content-Life Balance.

Cheez Whiz

"Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched. The things which are sacred or precious to us are the things we withdraw from promiscuous sharing. But now we are taught to throw everything within us into public light and common pawing." — Ayn Rand

Although I still write most days, I haven’t published anything for two months. No Tweets. No essays. Nada. As soon as I stopped sharing online, I felt surprisingly anxious about my absence—as if my audience or the algo expected me to keep posting to maintain an “online presence.” Are they worried about me?

Then after reading the brilliant book The Artist’s Way, I realized that I was violating the creative act. For most of the time, I saw writing not as art but as something to just get better at. While I really do love writing, at times it has felt like I was manufacturing a flimsy plastic product—especially when people said that I should do silly stuff like schedule Tweets or write “beginner level content.” It’s clear to me that this Cheez Whiz assembly line approach to creation contaminated its purity.²

In other words, all I want to write about my life and learnings in a non-performative way that escapes the bubble of virtual peer pressure. With tools like Otter and ChatGPT, we’re in the best time alive to capture and copy the exact footprint of our experiences and our education. I still want to do that.

Diary Entries

“I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.” — Oscar Wilde

Moving forward, I’m not totally signing off online, but I am implementing two heuristics.

First, I’m only gonna share when I have something to say. That could be today, tomorrow, or in two months. As Paul Graham once wrote, “An essay that told people things they already knew would be boring. You have to tell them something new.”

I like to think of myself as a detective, making discoveries and solving my own mysteries. A Sherlock Holmes of sorts. As an information investigator, I only want to share my findings when I feel like it’s game time for me.

As a professional amateur in all things I do, from playing piano to making pesto, I realize that this could be risky. My perfectionism is probably my greatest strength because I walk around with a microscope in my mind, demanding excellence everywhere. Case in point: it literally took me six months to find a blue couch and red Persian rug for my apartment. But it also may be my greatest weakness because I tend to think that my writing—an act of just being myself—isn’t good enough and may never be.³

Second, I’ve adopted an affirmation from Richard Feynman: nobody expects anything of me, including my audience. Curiosity and complete planetary alignment must be at center of my creations. Writing should feel like my childhood hobby of seeing the rings of Saturn through a telescope: it should feel like something I want to do, not something I have to do.

As Rick Rubin said, creating should also feel like a diary entry:

“Everything I make is a diary entry. The beauty of a diary entry is that I can write my diary entry, and you can't tell me that it wasn't good enough or that's not what I experienced. Of course it's what I experienced. I'm writing a personal diary for myself. No one else can judge it. It is my experience of my life. 

Everything we make can be that: a personal reflection of who we are in that moment of time. It doesn't have to be the greatest you could ever do. It doesn't have to have any expectation that it's gonna change the world. It doesn't have to sell a certain number of copies. It doesn't have any of those things. All it is is: I'm making this thing. I'm making this thing for me, and I want to do it to the best of my ability to where I feel good about it and where it's honest of where I'm at.”

Real Writing

In the spirit of creating what I want to consume, I’m sick of all the intellectual Cheez-Its of content on the Internet. As the Spanish say, hasta los cojones. I no longer believe in sharing every single naked, snackable thought. I want the steak. Steak takes longer to make and longer to chew, but that’s part of what makes it so satiating. Steak is dense with protein, not full of empty carbs.

This is what I’m going for with my own writing: a full type of full. I’m writing for satisfaction, not shock. Content fatigue is a real thing, and I figure that if you’re going to be investing your attention with me, I’m going to give you the full course meal—not just a bag of Doritos.

Even though it costs us zero cents to broadcast our brains, we should question the idea of sharing all of our ideas all of the time. I’m not necessarily against Twitter or sharing short-form thoughts, but I do think a dollop of discernment is in order. There’s a reason why McDonald’s is open 24/7. There’s a reason why anyone who reads Twitter for ten seconds feels their brain rot: because it’s the TikTok of writing.⁴

But most important of all, short form doesn’t let me develop a relationship with you, dear reader. I see myself writing forever, and I want to create an honest connection with you and bond over our shared passion for ideas and the pursuit of truth.

When it comes to long form, the battle of this essay lasted more than a month. I’ve read some of these sentences over 100 times. I’ve refined these ideas with six of my friends. By creating more in private first, I realized that my past habit of trying to post something daily and even weekly destroyed the depth, quality, and taste of my writing. Not just from the perspective that Tweets and newsletters aren’t really real writing, but also because I have more time and space to ship A+ writing that I’m actually stoked to tell you about.

Moving forward, as I learn to listen to the Muse more and just sit down at my MacBook most days, I trust that the results will take care of themselves. Creativity is an act of surrender that I’m learning to have more faith in.

Jerry Seinfeld famously said to find the torture you love, and I’ve found mine with writing. It’s almost effortless for me to write for 2-3 hours on Airplane Mode every day. I don’t drink caffeine or need ZYNs to stay stable. As long as I respect my intellectual curiosity and find my own Content-Life Balance, I know I got this.

I’m still writing online, which means that I still like driving with the windows down. But for most of the time, my car is in park. It’s locked. The windows are up. If they were always down, it would get so damn dusty, anyways. Plus, someone might steal something, and I might not even know that I was robbed.

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Thanks

Thank you to the people who contributed to this essay through feedback and conversation:

Adam Saks

, David Perell,

Jeff Sullivan

, Annemarie Allen,

Anthony D'Apolito III

, and Max Schult.

I also wanted to thank a few other people who inspired this essay:

• Nat Eliason
  and his wonderful essay, “Getting Too Good at the Wrong Thing.”

• Andrew McLuhan
  for helping me understand more of Marshall McLuhan’s work. I was shaken up by his essay, “Paradox and Tension in the Attention Economy.”

• Paul Millerd
  for helping mentor me and reach many of these conclusions.

Footnotes

1. One key difference between me and her is that she has savings and financial stability. I don't right now. And this underlying anxiety about money has been on the backburner of my mind for a while, probably playing a part in corrupting creation.

2. Early on, I didn’t realize the game that I and other people were playing. Scheduling Tweets and doing algo-adjusted activities is the game of making money from some kind of online business like coaching. What I wish I knew earlier was that I’m in the game of real writing and that for the next 3-10 years, I should think about making a stable income in an adjacent or different way than my own creations. No matter how I make money, I will always have reading and writing.

3. A great writer whom I deeply admire pointed out that deadlines can really help writers. He said that if I really want to go after this writing thing, I have to hustle and grind early on in my career. Given that, I like the low bar of publishing at least two pieces of writing every month, short or long. But the message of this essay is more about Content-Life Balance: surrendering to my own creativity and uniqueness and escaping the hive mind of Twitter.

4. Twitter is pretty cool, though. I don’t plan on deleting it because the people on that platform are the smartest people in the world. I’ve met friends and mentors and created jobs for myself by just reaching out to people. You can get in touch with founders and CEOs and almost anyone now—without credentials.

But from a media diet standpoint, I like to think of Twitter as dessert. Just like cotton candy ice cream, it’s a treat. Treats have their place, but they shouldn’t replace the steak, broccoli, and rice. Now, though, we live in a world that treats treats like water, so I have a hunch that we have to be careful. I’d rather miss out on staying up to date with Tweets than miss out on reading a Beautiful book like the Odyssey.