The Strategy of Not Sharing

The morning is Monday as usual. As soon as you wake up and grab your phone, you're browsing through a continuous stream of updates.

Your roommate in college recently got a puppy. Your aunt recently lost her dog. Your colleague baked sourdough bread from scratch. Your second cousin and their partner recently called it quits. quite widely known.

Before long, you're contributing to the cacophony. You're blogging about your seasonal depression and early morning fog. That terrible fear of existence. etc.

Before you've had your first cup of coffee, you've unknowingly consumed and divulged to the people in your life more personal information than your grandparents would have in a month.

Everything is incredibly, achingly human.

That's not always advantageous.

We hardly even realize this continuous sharing of our lives, this constant input and production of information, these days. It appears to be harmless conduct. We're still learning about the psychological, social, and emotional effects, though.

Since the first cave paintings and the oral storytelling customs of our ancestors, we have always sought to share our experiences with others. Social media has brought this craving to previously unheard-of heights. We can instantaneously communicate our ideas, emotions, and experiences with hundreds or even thousands of individuals by simply tapping a few buttons on a screen. A few decades ago, this power would have looked nearly godlike.

As they say, enormous power entails immense responsibility. To rip off the band-aid immediately, many of us are unprepared to take on this task. We fragment ourselves, spiral, and then spiral on top of our spiraling. We're not sure when or how to give up.

Before the advent of digital technology, privacy was the norm. It took work to share information through letter writing, phone calls, or in-person interactions. Nowadays, maintaining privacy takes work. We must consciously decide to withhold our thoughts and experiences from others, to fight the need to publish, and to share nothing at all.

This reversal carries significant consequences. When sharing is automatic, we share without giving it any thought, overflowing our networks with data. Yes, some of it is innocuous. Our darkest hours, our worries, our obsessive thoughts—so much of it is really personal.

Misinterpreted tweets create relationship strain or breakup. Careless updates hurt people's reputations. For many people who have been harmed by their own oversharing, these are not hypothetical situations; rather, they are their actual circumstances.

Not only are there external hazards, though. We are losing touch with who we are when we are always putting on a show for an audience and arranging our experiences for general consumption.

When was the last time you were involved in something significant? Even just one instance you wish to save. Fourth of July fireworks, screw it. Did you grab your phone to share it right away? And did you really feel the event itself during that sharing moment? Or had you already considered how to present it to your audience?

Our lives are always being edited for the benefit of the public, which leads to a risky feedback loop. Experiences are only valuable when they can be shared; we don't value them for their inherent value. We evaluate our lives based on the opinions of others rather than our own feelings.

It's easier than you might think to solve all of this: start a journal.

I know, groundbreaking.

Of course, journaling is nothing new. For millennia, people have kept journals and diaries. In the age of excessive sharing, the modest diary acquires new importance. Writing in a journal becomes a radical act of privacy, a conscious decision to keep our feelings and ideas to ourselves.

I consider my diary to be my personal, exclusive social media account, with just me as a follower. Similar to social media, it serves as a medium for me to express my ideas, emotions, and experiences. I don't have to curate, I don't have to perform, and I don't run the risk of oversharing like with social media.

My journal is developed in Notion. My journal entries typically don't exceed one paragraph. Usually, they take the form of 280-character, private tweets.

And I can be absolutely honest in that format. I can talk about my biggest hopes and anxieties without fear of being misunderstood or judged. I don't have to worry about repercussions when I vent about my job. I am the only one who will know if I am being serious, stupid, angry, or ecstatic.

It is immensely liberating to be allowed to be real. Without the skewed perspective of public opinion, I am better able to comprehend my own ideas and feelings and analyze my experiences more thoroughly. It provides me with a place away from the intense spotlight of public scrutiny where I may develop, reflect, and learn from my mistakes.

That's all very nice.

It can't contain all of our individuality. We must reserve a portion of ourselves for ourselves.

It need the same amount of reach as Threads or Twitter.

Write in your journal about your frustrating workday instead of posting about it elsewhere. Consider writing in your journal about your experiences and their significance to you rather than posting every little detail of your trip to Instagram. You may be amazed at how fulfilling this can be and how it helps you give your experiences a deeper, more meaningful analysis.

Keeping certain aspects of our lives private can seem almost countercultural in a world that prizes visibility over privacy. Actually, journaling is very punk as fuck.

It's a reclamation of something priceless: our inner life, our thoughts, and our experiences.

Even without the immediate response, it still has value.