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- [00:00]
A
Monday Sidekick the AI agent that knows you and your business, thinks ahead and takes action task at anything seriously. Monday Sidekick AI you'll love to use. Start a free trial today on Monday.com when did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone.
- [00:42]
B
Learn more@WhatsApp.com this whole episode is basically going to be me throwing shade at the fact that I used to feel the need to share every single meal and somewhat meaningful life experience on Instagram stories. Or it didn't happen. And I think this habit has been ingrained in all of us that if we don't have a witness to our life, then did we actually live it? It's that whole idea, well, if a tree falls in a forest and no one's around to hear it, did it make a sound? Yes, it made a sound. Just no one was there to hear it, but the sound happened. I don't actually know what the scientific explanation for for that question is, but in my opinion, the forest witnessed it. Okay? The animals who very much have ears witnessed it. They heard the tree falling. And just because a human knew well enough to leave nature the fuck alone for the first time, did not hear the tree falling doesn't mean it didn't make a sound. It just means we weren't there to hear it. And I was thinking about this conversation the other day that I had with a girlfriend who was basically like, you know, what is the point of really doing anything if you don't have anyone to share it with, right? It's this idea that our lives are rooted in community and the act of love and the act of joy is meant to be shared. And if it's not shared, well, then are we even joyful? Or do we feel love at all? And while I don't discount the joy of being able to break bread with others or share in a really cool experience with others, or go to Europe with your girlfriends and be like, oh my God, that was the best trip ever. Like, there's something so gratifying. I've realized over the last three years, especially since I've been on social media, there is something so gratifying about just living your life, knowing that the moment dies when it's over. And I know that sounds so morbid. But the thing is, like, I think about our parents and how they grew up and how photos were usually reserved for really special occasions or even if they weren't used for special occasions, we took photos with more care. We took photos with the intention of capturing a moment that we would one day look back upon. Whereas now I feel like we take photos so that we can show other people what we're doing instead of solidifying for ourselves what our lives meant in a current moment in time. Like, I have so many photos on my phone that I'm never going to look at that I thought would be meaningful. But really, I probably just took that photo for Instagram stories. And look, I can justify it, right? Because I'm like, well, it's my job. But at some point I've realized that I really care more about living my life right now rather than showing that I'm living my life. Because I really think that there must be something psychological that happens when you decide to prioritize sharing your life over living it. Like, there's something about the moment that gets ruined when you have to capture the moment to get the perfect angle or the perfect group photo. There's probably no better example of this than our wedding, where I literally hired basically TMZ to show up at our wedding. I mean, we had like a three person video, video crew, like three photographers, and just so many people capturing the moment that all I really remember from the day. And for those of you who have followed me for a bit on social media or who have read my substack on this, like, you guys know, my wedding was not my favorite thing ever. It wasn't horrible, it wasn't disaster. It looked great to everyone from the outside. But in terms of, like, top five life experiences, like, our wedding was not it. And my husband and I both agree on that. Like, Dave and I are both like, damn, we are never doing a big wedding again. Because you know what? It was for us, at least just us, all right? Because I know there's plenty of people who love their weddings. It felt like an experience that we were sharing because we needed a witness to that moment. And I think if we could go back in time, we would not do a big wedding. We would elope, spend all that money on a really nice vacation somewhere within the continental U.S. because Dave and I both don't like to travel internationally and just maybe have a really special dinner. Like, rent out a private room at our favorite Italian restaurant in the city for our immediate family and maybe, just maybe, throw A big party with our friends after. But who knows? Maybe not. Maybe that would be enough. One of my agents just got married this year and she honestly had my dream wedding, which I never would have thought, I would have said like five years ago, but she got married at city hall with her now husband and they went out to dinner afterwards, I think with like two friends, and that was it. And they're gonna save that money and put it towards a house or again, a fancy European vacation that they will enjoy for a much longer period of time than a three day party where everyone kind of knows their role and everyone plays a certain role. And then you kind of leave. You're like, okay, well, did I actually really want to play that role? Did I just play that role because society expected me to play that role? And honestly, one of the reasons, I think, why that piece that I wrote on why my wedding day was not the best day of my life, why that performed so well, and how it elicited so many comments from you guys on Instagram on how your wedding day was actually not the best day of your life too. And you feel guilty about that because you spent all this time and money and you love your husband. And it wasn't that, you know, you didn't want to be getting married. It's just that a friend of mine put it really well. She goes, you know, it all just felt so performative. And that's what it is, sharing your life versus living it. And I'm not saying you can't do both. But I think as a society, we've totally shifted to sharing our lives versus actually living it. Well, if other people see that we're living our lives, then it reinforces the fact that we're living it. And there's actually like a scientific reason why you should stop sharing your life. And here's what I discovered, because I was like, there must be a reason why I feel like I don't remember shit as much these days. Even though I have access to my entire life and my life history on my phone, my camera roll, don't even want to know how many photos are on it. And I never delete any of my photos. All 12,000 versions of the same photo I take, thinking I'm going to like, maybe one day develop it. I never delete anything. The phones just keep getting bigger and having more storage, so I never have to delete anything. But I don't really remember much. And I looked into this and it's actually neurological. So what's going on is it's Actually called the photo taking impairment effect. And basically documenting something really changes how you remember it. Because when you pull out your phone, your brain subconsciously decides, I don't need to store this, the photo will. So instead of really encoding these sensory details, like how a moment smelled or felt or sounded, your brain flagged the act of taking the photo as the memory itself, which is why we often remember the picture more vividly than the actual experience. And cognitively, you know you're no longer in the scene, you're curating it. Which is great if you're curating an Instagram feed or your stories, but for your life, for your brain power, the moment you frame a shot, your perspective becomes third person. You're shifting from I'm here living in this moment to how does this look or how will it look to my ex boyfriend who still watches my Instagram stories, or to that girl from high school that I hated but now follows me on Instagram. All of those things distances you from the emotional immediacy of what's happening. There has never been a time in our lives where we have documented more and remembered and lived less. And over the last, I would say, maybe 8ish months to year, I've really discovered that short of creating content for my job and actually sharing a few snippets here and there again for my job, that if I'm really enjoying a moment, it doesn't matter how mundane or how spectacular the moment is, if I don't want to pull out my phone, I don't fucking pull it out. And you know what? I have the luxury and the curse of maybe doing this. Because I've fashioned my business to not revolve around people needing updates from my life at all times. I say a blessing and a curse because while it's a blessing because I don't feel the need to document every single day on Instagram at a time. Like, I will ghost on Instagram for the whole weekend and not post. And guess what? Nobody notices. Because everyone's too busy living their own damn life to notice that I haven't posted an Instagram story in 36 hours. But that's beside the point. The point is, is that, like, I do not and I never have wanted to share every single aspect of my life on Instagram. First of all, the people in my life didn't sign up for that. Despite the fact that I live a public life online, most of the people closest to me are extremely private people. My family, super private. You've never seen them online. That's by Design Dave, my husband occasionally makes a cameo appearance, but really he's not part of my content either, except maybe verbally or in the stories that I write on substack. And so all of that means that my content has to be very curated, informational and inspirational, but it's not part of my daily life. And it's a blessing and it's a little bit of a curse because I realized I've missed out on forming that parasocial relationship that a lot of people feel like they have with their favorite lifestyle creators who are updating their lives every day, who are bringing you through the mundane day to day living of making a coffee or what they ate for dinner. But I just have never had any interest in that. Like, I don't want you guys to feel like you're living in my house with me. I want you to feel like you're one of my girlfriends, one of my best girlfriends that I haven't seen in a really long time. But that every time we catch up it feels like no time has passed. It feels like you're my best girlfriend who moved to the west coast, I'm on the east coast and we catch up once a quarter and we unpack and dissect everything he, she or they did and. And it feels like nothing has changed. And the reason why that feels different versus somebody who's in my day to day life is because we've had time to reflect on what has happened. We've had time to reflect on why things unfolded the way they did. And I think ultimately you can't come to that conclusion if you don't actually fully root yourself in the present.
- [12:18]
A
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- [13:13]
B
Like, I look at the past version of myself in my 20s and I'm just so annoyed at her. You know why? Because, like, the old me, whatever, 10 years ago, would constantly ask to recreate a moment. You know, I mean, we've all done that. It's like, okay, we need to take a couple more group shots because I don't look good in this group shot, or the angle is funny, or the lighting is weird, or my arm looks fat because I didn't, you know, stick it out enough and it's pressed up against my side or. Or whatever bullshit excuse I had for taking literal seconds or minutes away from the moment so that I could capture the moment in a way that I wanted to remember it. And these days, honestly, like, I'm never the person that's gonna ask for a group picture these days, but if I am, I'm like, you know what? It's one and done. If I look like I've gained 20 pounds in that photo or the lighting is off, then so be it. It's about the moment as it existed. And guess what? The photo is never actually really gonna capture the moment anyways. Like, the photo always sucks in comparison to the moment. And every single professional photo shoot I've ever done with my family or myself has always been awkward as fuck in order to create a beautiful photo. So I kind of think sometimes, like, we can't have both. Like, you can either have an amazing photo that's a piece of art on its, or you can have an amazing moment that doesn't get captured well or captured at all, but you can't have both. And I say this a week before we're about to do our family holiday photos in the park, knowing full well that Dave and I with Sawyer are going to go contort ourselves into a million different, quote, unquote, happy, natural family photo poses for the Christmas card. But in saying that, like, that's gonna be half an hour of our day next Saturday, and the rest of the Saturday I will spend literally with my phone in my pocket, completely ghosting all of you. Because in order to live my life the way I want to live it, I can't share it with you guys in the moment. I can share it with you after the fact, but the moment is mine. And I can't create something to give to you if I don't have something that is truly mine first. And I think the bigger issue, too, with not realizing that having a witness for our lives doesn't automatically validate our lives is the fact that we're outsourcing our self worth to what people perceive our lives to be. So if something great happens to you and you share it on social media and you don't get enough likes or views on it, does that invalidate how great of an experience it was? I think all of us would like to say no, it doesn't affect how great that experience was. But what happens neurologically is that it does affect how we remember that experience. That maybe it wasn't that great of a life moment. If people in our lives that we know personally didn't comment congratulations or or you know what, maybe this year you didn't get as many happy birthday messages on your birthday post. Does that mean your birthday was any less special? Because by the way, the people who are actually in your life, not just the ones on your phone watching your life, may have made your birthday really, really special. But. But now there's this added component of like I took all these photos from my really special birthday and I posted them online in a perfect little curated carousel to show everybody how loved I am. And I expected everyone online who is a part of my life online to express how loved I am and to reinforce that feeling. And when they don't, it feels like I'm a failure. It feels like I'm not special. And that's the danger is that the danger is we start correlating external validation and the opinions of the witnesses in our lives over our own opinions. But the thing about witnesses is, is that like they're experiencing your life from a third party perspective. They're not experiencing it in the moment. And this is what we talk about with nuance and taking things out of context is that a lot of times people's quotes or remarks are taken out of context and then they don't make sense on their own or they take on a completely different meaning on their own. And that's what's happening in your life every time you share a snippet of it. I'm never shocked anymore when I see terrible news about a picture perfect individual, influencer or family online. I'm never shocked when I see a couple who presented the perfect front online get divorced. Because again, what you're seeing and what we're all seeing has been taken out of context. And aside from all of the above facts that I just stated about why we're as a society leaning too heavily on validation from these social media apps and the people who don't really matter at all to us. I think what also is dangerous here is that needing a witness for your life or needing people to validate your life leaves you clinging to the wrong people. I think about how this idea that somebody, just because they grew up with us or witnessed some of the most trying times in our lives or were there for us when, you know, we were in our early 20s, and how sometimes we outgrow those people and it becomes very confusing because it's like, well, I was supposed to be friends with this person forever, and I grew up with this person and they were a witness to the first 30 some years of my life, and I was a witness to theirs. And now we're no longer really in each other's lives. We're not witnessing each other's lives. And it feels like a loss because it's like, well, this person was always an external component of how I felt about myself. I felt like that a lot when I went to college. I remember I had a really close group of six girlfriends in high school. And I'm really grateful that I'm actually still friends with all of them today. We have a very active group chat going. We were just discussing Thanksgiving plans and whether any of us were going to be back home in Philly. And I think about the fact that I'm grateful that we have grown together, that we have grown together in a healthy way where we still check in on each other and we still feel like we're a part of each other's lives, but in a very non codependent way. And trust me, I've been in my fair share of codependent friendships and I've had it enough to know that, that there is a difference between growing with your friends and staying friends with somebody simply because there's a shared history there. And I think there is something particularly disorienting about having somebody be a part of your life through like the bad times, the struggle times, and then not having them in your life later on because it feels like the trauma bond should be forever, but it's not. And if you're in a situation like this, I want you to remember that friendship, just as a lot of relationships don't have to last forever to be valid, you can be best friends with some women in college and not talk to them 10 years later because you've just grown apart, doesn't mean anybody's a bad person. It just means you are no longer witnesses in each other's lives. And I feel like I hear this all the Time from you guys and from my friends, too. In my personal life, it's like, okay, well, I was friends with a group of people in college and now I'm still friends with them. Like, we're going through the motions of getting dinner once a month or checking in, but not because we actually feel really connected, but because we feel like we have to. And that's where it gets really dangerous. Because then all of a sudden it's like, okay, well, who am I without these people? Who am I without a witness in my life? And it's like, girl, you have been the same person with or without a witness in your life. It's just that you attached all your self worth to these people. Watching you grow up, watching you do things, and watching you live life. And the fact is, you're going to live your life whether or not anybody's watching, commenting, or critiquing it. Just like the tree who fell in the forest is going to make a sound whether or not somebody is around to hear it. You know what? Maybe a human wasn't around to hear it, but a squirrel did. A bunny rabbit did. And maybe this is the chapter of your life where you're not necessarily looking for somebody to enter the forest of your existence to hear the tree. Or else, you know, it didn't actually fall. It's a reminder that you are the fucking tree. You fell. And even if the only living creature to hear it was an ant, actually, I don't know, can ants hear? All right, even if the only living thing to hear the fact that you fell in the forest of your life was a mangy fox, that's okay, because you need to learn that your life happens whether or not other people are validating that it's happening. And I think when I learned that, I was like, oh my God, this is so freeing because a now I don't have carpal tunnel. Because I'm not refreshing every Instagra post to see how many likes I got or to see who's watching my stories five minutes after I post it. It's like, okay, I am living my life for me. And I enjoy it so much more because I'm not rushing to document it. Because the reality is, most of my favorite moments in my life, they're pretty mundane. They involve hanging out with Dave, my parents, and Sawyer on a Saturday afternoon doing absolutely nothing. Maybe everybody's on their respective screens, but we're all together and that's what matters. Those are my favor moments. And those moments don't look good on social media. And they're certainly not noteworthy, but they really make the bread and butter of my life. More so than all of the noteworthy moments, the big, splashy moments that make my feed, like our engagement and our marriage. And so these days, I'm no longer crowdfunding or outsourcing my worth. I'm turning inwards and realizing that I can live and feel worthy, even if nobody saw my breakfast.
- [23:55]
A
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