When life is staged for the feed

Experiences have started becoming evidence

I chose the restaurant because it was having a moment. My friend asked if I’d been before. I hadn’t, but it had shown up in my social media feed at least three times the previous week. That, it turned out, was the point.

The space was all soft curves and terracotta. Every surface textured, every corner Instagrammable. The whole place is designed to look like someone’s impossibly chic living room. I photographed my Martini, took a selfie with our drinks, shot a boomerang for good measure, then finally took a sip. My friend happily posed with me. Content done, we slipped back into conversation, as if the last few minutes had been entirely normal.

It wasn’t. And we both knew it.

Something shifted over the last decade. We all felt it, but nobody named it. Experiences stopped being private and started becoming evidence.

Once you notice it, you see it everywhere. The coffee shop, designed less for comfort than for photography; the bookshop that feels more like a backdrop than a place to browse; and the park bench positioned perfectly for sunset selfies. Cities now quietly redesign themselves for documentation. Restaurants engineer lighting. Hotels have staff whose sole job is to help you create “shareable moments” worthy of your followers’ attention. Even airports come with designated photo zones.

An entire infrastructure is built around the assumption that nothing quite counts unless it is seen.

The word “curated” has crept into every corner of our lives. Curated playlists. Curated feeds. But this isn’t curation. Curation implies judgement, restraint, and intent. This is staging. Everyday life has become content, and we are the unpaid creative directors of a show no one explicitly agreed to produce.

Even private moments aren’t spared. We rearrange bookshelves before video calls. We photograph coffee before drinking it. We choose holidays for how they’ll look online, restaurants for their lighting, and outfits for how they’ll read against a background. The performance isn’t forced. It’s internalised. Automatic.

The economics have followed the psychology. You can now outsource taste entirely. Subscription boxes for identity. Personal shoppers for personality. Someone else curating your clothes, your home, and even your sense of self. We’ve handed over authorship of who we are to people with better aesthetics and no stake in the outcome.

And we’re tired.

Because the performance never ends. Casual moments require planning. Weekend plans are chosen for narrative potential. Vacations are reverse-engineered from photos we want to take. The question has shifted from “Will I enjoy this?” to “Will this look like I enjoyed this?”

What’s been lost isn’t authenticity; it is the freedom of being unobserved, even by ourselves. The permission to do something because it pleased you, without translating it into meaning, signal, or proof.

The restaurant was genuinely extraordinary. The food deserved the hype. The Martini was perfectly balanced. The service invisible in the best way.

But I’d already chosen the filter before I’d finished drinking it.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)