We Don’t Want to Be Happy Anymore. We Want People to Think We Are.

Would you still want your dream life if nobody could ever see it? I recently watched a video where someone was asked a question that should have had the easiest answer imaginable: If you could go on a completely free vacation, but you weren’t allowed to take a single photo or video for social media, would you still go? She firmly said no.

Apparently, she was trying to grow her social media, and if she couldn’t post about the experience or gain followers from it, she didn’t even want to be there.

My first thought was: That is completely insane. My second was considerably less convenient: How different are the rest of us, really?

Maybe most of us would still take the free holiday. I certainly would. I have principles, but apparently they disappear somewhere around complimentary room service.

But change the question slightly. Would you still care about getting into that restaurant if nobody knew you went? Would you buy the same handbag if nobody could recognise it? Would you still want the enormous wedding if there were no photographs? Would you go to the party if nobody knew you had been invited? Would you still want your dream life if you were the only person who ever got to see it?

We talk endlessly about social media making us insecure, shortening our attention spans and destroying our self-esteem. But now that I think about, it has done something even stranger.

It has made being perceived an inseparable part of experiencing.

Apparently, being happy isn’t enough anymore. Other people need to know we’re happy, too. Happiness, it seems, now requires witnesses. It needs a carousel, a location tag, a story, and of course a photo dump. A little song playing over a sunset, maybe a carefully casual caption implying none of this was particularly important to you, despite spending forty minutes deciding which photograph should go first.

We don’t just go on holiday anymore, we produce the holiday. We don’t just eat dinner, no we document dinner. We don’t just fall in love, oh no, we soft-launch, hard-launch, anniversary-dump and, if things go badly, quietly remove all evidence that this person ever existed.

Even our private lives have developed public aesthetics. Reading has an aesthetic. Running has an aesthetic. Healing has an aesthetic. Staying home has an aesthetic. People now make Instagram posts about how wonderful it is to spend less time on Instagram, which feels like a joke we have somehow all agreed to take seriously.

Humans have always performed status. Social media didn't invent vanity. We were perfectly capable of being unbearable before Wi-Fi. What changed is that we now carry the audience everywhere.

You see a beautiful sunset and somewhere between experiencing it and appreciating it, another thought appears: This would make a beautiful story. So you take out your phone. Then you move slightly because the railing looks ugly. Then another because the first one didn't capture it properly. Then a video. Suddenly, you're no longer watching the sunset. You're watching yourself watching the sunset. Perhaps that is what social media has really changed. It hasn't just given us an audience.

It has taught us to become our own audience.

We’ve Turned Happiness Into Evidence

A holiday somehow feels more glamorous once it exists on Instagram. A relationship can feel more legitimate once someone posts you. A career achievement becomes more real once LinkedIn knows about it. Even exercise feels suspiciously incomplete if your watch didn't record it. We have become accustomed to translating our lives into proof. And perhaps being perceived as happy has become so seductive because happiness itself is unstable, while perception can be controlled.

You cannot guarantee that your holiday will make you happy, but you can make it look enviable. Once again, you cannot guarantee your relationship is fulfilling, but you can make everyone else believe it is.

The image becomes easier to manage than the feeling itself. Eventually, we risk optimising our lives for visibility rather than fulfilment, and this right here, is why it's scary.

Maybe Some of Our Desires Aren’t Even Ours

This is the part I find slightly terrifying. How much of what we want would we still want if nobody could see us having it? Social media no longer just sells us products, no rather it sells us entire lives.

The same hotels. The same restaurants. The same cities. The same weddings. The same Pilates classes. The same summer destinations. The same suspicious amount of matcha. Eventually, familiarity starts feeling a lot like desire.

Maybe you genuinely want to spend August in Mallorca. Or just maybe, you have watched enough beautiful people spend August in Mallorca that your brain has quietly filed it under Things Happy People Do.

Maybe you genuinely want the handbag, the apartment, the marathon, the intimate Tuscan wedding and the relationship that photographs beautifully. But reality how would you know? The algorithm rarely asks what you want. It simply shows you something often enough that eventually you begin asking how to get it.

Which makes one question particularly uncomfortable: Would I still want this if nobody could ever know I had it? No photograph. No story. No likes. No comments. Nobody replying Need your life.

Just you and the thing you supposedly wanted. If the desire disappears when the audience does, perhaps what you wanted wasn't the experience. You wanted the perception attached to it. And maybe that's why the woman refusing the free holiday feels so absurd. She has simply taken the logic we're all participating in and followed it to its natural conclusion.

If an experience cannot become content, it loses some of its value. The holiday isn't just a holiday anymore where you relax, It's inventory.

The Best Parts of Your Life Might Be Completely Useless Online

The person responding to the original video described his best trips as the ones where he couldn't post and was simply “locked in” to the fun in front of him. Maybe that's what we're actually losing. Not privacy. Presence.

Some of the happiest moments of our lives will produce absolutely nothing. They'll happen while our phones are somewhere else. Conversations nobody records. Jokes nobody else understands. Dinners that photograph terribly. Kisses nobody sees. Friendships that don't need a birthday carousel proving they exist. There will be no content. Tragic, I know. Just the slightly old-fashioned experience of actually having a life.

So imagine someone offers you the holiday of your dreams. Everything is paid for. The hotel is stunning. The weather is to die for. You can bring whoever you want. There is only one condition. Nobody can ever know you went. No photos. No stories. No carousel. Nobody saying I'm so jealous. You only get the experience. Would that still be enough?

Because if it wouldn't, perhaps social media hasn't simply changed how we document happiness. Perhaps it has changed what happiness means.

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