No One Cares, But That's a Good Thing

I promise this letter contains an overarching positive message.

I fucking love Substack. Last February when I decided to join the platform, I didn’t really understand what it was or how deep it ran besides it being another place for me to deploy a weekly newsletter directly to my subscribers’ inboxes. Since then, it has grown so much and really and truly helped keep my reborn flame for reading alive and very well. There is no shortage of thoughtful, funny, engaging, interesting writers out here in these Stacks, and I find new ones every week to obsess over.

Example: I saw someone restack this letter by

Freya India

yesterday, saved it, treated myself to a thorough read-through of it today, and was so inspired by her message that I’m now here writing my own message about her message.

Freya’s letter explores the self-imposed pressures of documenting every single moment of your life via social media and, as a recovering IG-holic, I obviously ate up every word, nodding my head in agreement and even feverishly copying and pasting quotes into a Google doc so I could share them back with you all here.

One of her thoughts is something my sister says to me to calm me down when I’m having a self-important social media moment. She even went as far to gift me a frame housing the phrase, which I hung over my hand towel in the bathroom as a daily reminder.

“…here’s the truth: nobody cares about your life.”

Although I’ve always lived at the very bottom of the influencer totem pole, I’ve lived there. I’m all too familiar with the self-important “…but if I don’t post, people will wonder if I’m okay” line of thought (which has been proven invalid to me time and time again). And listen, OF COURSE people care, but they don’t “care” in the way your real life friends and family do. They don’t “care” to the point where it’s going to legitimately effect their day-to-day lives. They don’t “care” the way that someone who knows you — like, really knows you — cares. Because they can’t. Because we as humans were not meant to form so many strictly virtual relationships and be privy to so many strangers’ lives as they portray them online. It’s just not natural.

Some of the examples Freya shares in her letter are shocking. The video of the woman’s entire family entering the hospital room where she just gave birth, all of them clad with phones in hand to capture the gender reveal on video, is fucked. Freya puts it so perfectly when she says “The most meaningful experiences in human life—things that happen once, twice, never again—corrupted by thoughts like ‘is the camera getting my good angle?’” We’ve relinquished all the power to our phones — we don’t see things through our own eyes anymore. Our POV is so often our phone’s. Phone eats first, feels first. Fuck, phone LIVES first.

And, to piggy back off what Freya said, no one cares.

At the end of the day, no one cares that you had that salad for lunch. No one cares that you made your bed this morning. No one cares that your leftovers taste as good as if not BETTER than when they were fresh! No one cares that you were at a concert and had really good seats and they played your favorite song.

AND I AM GUILTY OF ALL THESE THINGS.

Hell, I practically invented the notion of oversharing online since I’ve been doing it for almost 14 years. I don’t write this to act holier than thou or come off delusional. I write it to share a long overdue epiphany.

I am well aware that I have been the problem for a long time. I’m not trying to hide the fact that I have been that person for years (I remember many years ago, a guy friend once quipped, ‘I practically know when you’re on your period because of your Instagram!’ Sometime after that, I took the guesswork out of it and more or less started publicly tracking my cycle every month because mystery is really hard for me) — it’s why I had to log off of Instagram indefinitely on December 31. Call it age or a shitty year or a general life revelation, but the notion of keeping some¹ things sacred finally clicked for me in 2023. Whereas I used to view someone being “offline” as an indicator of something to hide or being innately boring or not having anything interesting to share, I now see it for what it is: a luxury.

Being offline in 2024 is a fucking luxury.

Of course, OF COURSE, there are good sides to and positive outcomes of social media. You’re here, aren’t you? You’re here reading this letter, which means you found me or were introduced to me and enjoyed me enough to subscribe. I’ve met many people via Instagram who’ve impacted my life in one way or another, and I know they’d say the same about me. Social media, when used correctly, can be influential in healthy ways. Hell, it can even be fun! You can find likeminded individuals with similar life experiences with whom you really connect, yes. But it can also feel like a never-ending pissing contest with constant displays of falsified or exaggerated strength, happiness, thinness, wellness, anger, sadness, outrage —you name it, social media has it in droves.

“Pics or it didn’t happen” used to be a funny throwaway phrase Millennials would use to razz each other at the beginning of our relationship with social media, when taking low-quality pictures of your monochromatic plate of Tex-Mex food and throwing the Nashville filter on it was the height of Instagram. Now, as Freya argues in her letter, it truly is as though life didn’t happen unless you have the content to prove it and, to live like that and capture it all, one must let the phone see first. Always.

I used to be all about setting up sneak shots to capture moments on video, but after suffering two pregnancy losses last year, the videos I have of telling friends and family members serve mostly as triggers. In fact, I have them “hidden” in my camera roll so I don’t accidentally stumble across them. Of course, there’s a time and place for video footage like, say, my wedding when I walked down the aisle to a gas station ad. But in being off Instagram for almost three weeks now, I’m re-learning how to just live in the moment and not view everything through a “this could be content” lens, and it’s freeing.

And don’t get me wrong — I’m not NOT taking pictures and video of everyday life and moments, big or small. I’m just not taking them for you anymore; I’m taking them for me. And I’m not taking them with a subconscious ulterior motive to doctor them up and share them later in a clever way that grabs your attention as you doom scroll just so you can like it and comment on it and tell me I’m pretty and worthy — I’ll leave that heavy lifting to my family and friends.

“…put the camera down. Don’t document everything. Stop selling your life off so cheaply to strangers. Keep some things sacred. Let some memories fade and look back at them through fuzzy nostalgia instead of the cheap glare of an iPhone camera roll. Enjoy the fireworks.”

Freya India

1. Most.