Does This Count as Content?
What’s the Point of Posting Anything?
Many months ago, I declared myself “back” online. Unshackled! I’d written and posted a thing, unclogged my creative dam, and vowed to move forward posting freely.
Then I… didn’t.
I froze. Because the question “what now?” felt so itchy, so uncomfortable, I had to run away and hide behind my Google Docs like they were a weighted blanket.
Back when Instagram was my career, I followed a simple rubric: every post had to inspire, entertain, or educate. I treated every caption like a mini TED Talk: hook, joke, thesis, mic drop. You know how hard it is to land a mic drop when you’re also trying to sell collagen powder?
I got dressed knowing my outfit might be photographed—even if it was just my sleeve. Or my shoe. Or just a hint of my Apple Watch band. I chewed food while mentally churning it into a recipe or a pun. I exercised partly for the runner’s high, but mostly to say hi! to a camera.
I’d spend the length of an HBO drama editing a 10-second boomerang of my smoothie. Then I’d sit at a nail salon, next to strangers also getting dead skin scrubbed off their feet, and watch them swiping aimlessly, thinking how ridiculous it was to pour my validation—and my creative juice—into what people with drying fingernails haphazardly tap-tapped on.
My brand—spunky, life-loving hype girl—was so performatively “authentic” it eventually calcified into a cage.
I wasn’t just sharing my personality—I was sanding off the parts that didn’t fit the persona. Turns out, as I learned after a mental breakdown, living as a public persona makes you a private stranger.
When I finally quit social media—no dramatic farewell post, just a ghosting—I didn’t just ditch the app. I lobotomized the impulse to share.
And yet… lately, I’ve had the urge to share again? 🤢
But when I open my phone, I stare at it like a feral raccoon… discovering a phone.
What is this shiny rectangle? Do I eat it? Is it safe?
I keep getting stuck on: Who am I talking to? And why?
Is there a point to posting a sunrise if it’s not a metaphor for resilience?
The Window
I love looking into people’s windows at night.
The casual, glowy glimpses you catch while walking down the street after dinner. A TV flickering. A dad helping with homework. Someone eating over the sink next while their cat sits on the counter. It’s one of the only things that makes me feel instantly, viscerally connected to humanity.
It’s not voyeurism—it’s witnessing unselfconscious life. They don’t know I’m looking. They’re not curating the moment. They’re just… existing. And that’s what makes it beautiful. That’s what makes it feel real. That and the pile of clothes up against their bedroom window.
Instagram is different.
On the Internet, people build their windows knowing others are looking. They light them just right. They pose. They edit. They curate. They position a cute snake plant on their digital windowsill and pretend they weren’t just yelling at their kid five seconds ago.
Instagram is like if everyone hired a set designer, installed dimmers, wrote a witty sign for the windowsill, and then stood behind the glass waving like,
“Look! Look at me! I’m effortlessly relatable!”
We know people are watching on social media. So we arrange the furniture of our lives with that in mind. We post knowing we’ll be judged, misunderstood, skipped over, screenshotted.
We live in houses with the curtains wide open—on purpose. (Then complain about privacy like we didn’t just live-stream our lunch.)
⁉️
So here’s the question I keep circling back to:
How do we show up as ourselves—not to perform, not to impress, not to build a brand—but just to say: I’m here. I’m living.
And why do we want to be seen living at all?
Is it loneliness?
Is it longing?
Is it our way of whispering I exist into the void?
The Bernadette Test
A quote from my favorite novel keeps replaying in my head. In Where’d You Go, Bernadette, the main character, Bernadette, is struggling just a weeeee bit with her mental health… and also her grip on reality.
Her mentor tells her:
“Bernadette, people like you must create. If you don’t create, you will become a menace to society.”
Author Maria Semple has said she wrote the entire book—a hilarious, satirical heartfelt unraveling of Bernadette’s sanity—based on that one line. The line that got her imagining what would happen to someone like her if she didn’t write. If she became a menace.
I haven’t become a menace, as far as I know, but when I don’t write, create, communicate—I do start to unravel. Not in a poetic, “oh the threads of my soul are gently loosening” kind of way. In a “shit, there’s a giant snag in my soul sweater and I think I just made it worse by picking at it during bath time” kind of way.
So I create. I write.
But here’s where I get tripped up: the sharing of it.
Why post the blurry photo of my toddler’s pancake art? Why share a caption that doesn’t end in a TED Talk, a CTA, or a discount code for probiotics?\
Why bother making a window at all if I’m not trying to attract attention?
The Machine
You know, social media didn’t start as a grift.
Instagram, Twitter—even blogs before them—were first created so you could share what you were doing with your real friends. No algorithms. No brand deals. No personas. Just “Here’s my lunch!” “Here’s my weird mood!” “Here’s my baby eating a shoe!”
It was users—us—who began idolizing feeds.
We turned amateur diaries into polished personas.
We saw attention go to a few people and thought, “Wait… this could be a job.”
And capitalism, never one to miss a party, showed up with a tripod and said:“Let’s monetize your personality!”
“Bingo.”
Boom—platforms pivoted. The feed changed. Suddenly they were built for influence, monetization, and metrics.
The personal became performative.
And that quiet window you used to peek through?
It turned into a storefront. Curated. Merch’d. Monetized. Suddenly we weren’t sharing—we were selling.
But maybe that machine is just one version.
Maybe we can use it differently now. A side-step.
I make photo books.
Actual, physical, glossy little books using an app called Chatbooks. (Here’s an affiliate link for one free photo book!) Each month, I upload family photos, print them out, and read them with my daughter, Hannah. She’s three. She loves them. I love them. I love that she loves them.
There’s a feature in the app where, instead of choosing photos from your roll manually, you can link your Instagram account and WHAM! BAM! print your feed.
This both intrigues me… and freaks me out.
Do I admire that some people’s Instagram feeds are so pristine and heartfelt they double as legacy projects? Or do I find it a little icky that something as intimate as a child’s first steps is immediately filtered, captioned, and tossed into the feed for public consumption?
AND WHY DO I FEEL SO WEIRD ABOUT IT?
Do I wish my feed could double as an heirloom? Or am I repulsed by the very idea?
What Would Camus Do?
And this is when I turn to Albert Camus.
My favorite—and the sexiest—of the existential philosophers.
Since he’s very dead, I had to ask myself: What Would Camus Do?
💬
Camus believed life is Absurd. Not like ‘Ugh, Mondays’—more like ‘We’re all searching for meaning and the universe left us on read.’”
No grand puppeteer. No astrological fate. Just us, trying to make sense of it all while yelling into the void and waiting for three dots to appear.
His solution? Rebel. Embrace that absurdity. Live with midnight streaking energy.
Live like it’s all meaningless… and still choose joy.
Live like life is one big “LOL nothing matters, but I feel good about this, so I’m doing it anyway.”
I think Camus would say: “Of course you want to be seen, Tals. That’s the human condition. In order for life to feel meaningful, we all just want to scream I EXIST! into the void.”
That’s why people dedicate park benches to deceased loved ones. Or… rest stations? (Shoutout to the Whitney Houston Memorial Rest Stop on the NJ Turnpike—??)
We’re all just trying to carve proof of our lives into some modern cave wall—whether it’s stone, benches, toilets, or pixels.
I don’t think Camus would tell us to suppress the urge. He’d tell us to admit it. Flood your grid with mismatched debris: a poem, a grocery rant, a blurry photo of your kid’s pantsless pancake-making. Rot aesthetic. Let engagement be background noise. Because it ultimately doesn’t matter.
Still get out of bed. Still post the pancake. Still write the weird essay no one asked for.
Because even if the universe doesn’t clap for you—you’re still here.
That’s the Camus move.
To whisper, “I want to be seen. I want to exist.” But not need applause for it.
That’s rebellion.
🔄 So what’s the philosophical justification for sharing?
You’re not sharing to prove you matter.
You’re sharing to say:
“Here’s what life feels like for me. Does it feel like that for you too?”
Then, what counts as content?
Maybe it’s not the polished flatlay or the perfectly paced caption arc.
Maybe it’s not about growth, your personal brand, or a “value add.”
Maybe content can just be… presence.
A tiny moment of attention.
Something real. Or weird. Or boring. Or beautiful. Or absolutely nothing at all.
Maybe content isn’t a performance.
Maybe it’s a breadcrumb trail.
Or a window left cracked open—no signage, no spotlight—just light from inside a life being lived.
Because in an absurd world, meaning isn’t handed to you.
You make it.
Like art. Like pancakes. Like the blurry photo of your baby eating her toes that you’ll never delete.
So here I am again. “Back.”
But this time without a dramatic declaration or a five-point strategy.
Just a quiet rebellion.
A window, not a storefront.
A middle finger with a foam heart on top.
Hi again. I exist.
I feel so seen by this!!! Thank you for sharing what's in so many of our (my) heads!
You may be the first person I ever subscribed to, and I am glad you're back!