Want To Be Happy? Stop Curating Your Life And Start Creating It.

How social media is making a celebrity of us all. And celebrities are the most miserable people in the world.

Photo by Eaters Collective on Unsplash

“I wish everyone could get rich and famous and everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that’s not the answer.” — Jim Carey

We are all self-curators in the exhibition of our lives.

We constantly try to be our best foot forward in job interviews, family events and professional settings. Even when someone asks: how are you? You tend to only reply in the best way possible.

But these were all external environments. Transient and part of the social convention we all implicitly accept.

The only time we had to curate the inner working of our lives was when we had guests over to our house. We would clean, sanitize and pack away any of the ugly day-to-day elements that are vital to our survival, but boring to show.

Once everyone left, we could relax. Return to our normal selves and enjoy the space we create for ourselves. But social media has changed how we interact with the outside world.

The Tyranny of Social Media

“Posting on social media is a means of narrativizing our own lives: What we’re telling ourselves our lives are like. And when we don’t feel the satisfaction that we’ve been told we should receive from a good job that’s fulfilling, balanced with a personal life that’s equally so, the best way to convince yourself you’re feeling it is to illustrate it for others.”

— Anne Helen Peterson, Buzzfeed

The availability of posts and Instagram stories have made the once-off curation process a 24/7 job.

With the hedonic treadmill of content creation, the need for novel displays of status, wealth and beauty for others to consume has become all-encompassing.

With the ability to share instantaneously, we’ve taken personal and private parts of our lives and packaged them for other people to consume. We’ve created a museum for our lives that people can walk through.

We have become unconsciously addicted to this type of performative storytelling. Once we create an outward projection of ourselves through our Instagram feed, we constantly feel the need to position ourselves as fun and distance ourselves from the necessary but mundane aspects of life.

Lost in the process is your mental health. What parts of your life did you build just for yourself to enjoy? You are so busy curating for others that you’ve forgotten about the most important person in your life: you.

The loss of self means you are no longer present in the moment. You are always externally focussed, think about how others might interpret and judge your life. The enjoyment of any activity can only be interpreted by a filter.

You are obsessed with image-conscious posturing. The gulf between the carefully filtered image you present to the world and the reality that can’t measure up contributes to the burnout you feel.

On Social Media

I am not in the school of thought that vilifies social media. Social media is a tool just like a hammer. Depending on the skill and intent of the user, you can bruise your thumb or build a house with it.

Social media can help you build your brand, and career and cultivate meaningful opportunities. Social media can also be used to bully and harass others too. The user determines the value of the tool, not the other way around.

But the risks of curation are real. The gulf between the image we curate online and the reality of our lives is getting wider and wider.

Social media can trap you as you endlessly attempt to display your life for others to consume. You become the celebrity of your own life. The star of your own movie.

We are all in our own version of The Truman Show, endlessly curating our lives for the consumption and entertainment of others.

Your insatiable appetite to be perceived as cool or interesting is a common plight for a generation raised on social media, where the Instagram facade of happiness is all that matters.

Once you’ve come to derive your identity from your social media following or likes, you’ve reinforced a certain identity and expectations of your life that can be hard to live up to.

“In this blurring of the public/private curated spheres, there exists both the danger of loss of self along with the motivation to also strive to be our best self” — Michael Harris

No one is happy all the time nor always traveling or always having fun. The meaningful things in life such as relationships are often forged through the mundane and boring tasks of day-to-day existence.

“The lives we share are, in many ways, not our lives at all. They’re curated content. We’ve all become individual advertisers of our own lives, whether we mean to be or not. In most (not all) cases, we show only the best of things,” writes Katy Harrison.

We only show what we want to show. Social media can give us the illusion of connection. A false sense of reality. We are no longer trying to keep up with the Joneses, but rather trying to Keep Up with the Kardashians.

I don’t know which one is worse.

5 Steps to Start Creating Your Life

1. Start With This Step First.

Put down the phone and take a break from social media. Every vaccine begins with careful knowledge of the enemy's disease.

Accessibility: I’ve become really hardline about when I can use my phone and when I can’t. I’ll avoid using my phone at the dinner table, at meetings or when I am talking to people.

I find it rude. I’ll even chastise friends who are constantly on their phones scrolling in a social setting. You are not that busy nor that important to have to constantly reply to everyone.

Applications: From Monday — Friday I delete any social media apps off my phone. If I want to access them, I have to do so from a desktop. This added friction is surprisingly effective. I mainly checked my social media out of habit rather than anything else.

2. Get mindful and intentional.

Once you’ve created more time and space to think it is time to get intentional. Most people aren’t aware of how much they are sacrificing themselves to stay on this endless loop of self-curation.

Enjoy the moment. You don’t need to capture everything. Enjoy the meal in front of you. Embrace nature without the need to share it. Be present with your friends without the need to promote it.

Take more time and space through your days and week to just think. You’ll be surprised by what ideas come through your mind during long periods of solitude and mindfulness.

Being present can go a long way in your enjoyment of an activity.

Whenever you feel the urge to start curating simply ask yourself: ‘why?’

Once you can start to ask yourself that question, identify the emotion driving your impulse and find an alternative solution or simply let it go. Doing this is the mental equivalent of doing one bicep curl for your mind.

Your job is to consume for yourself, not create for others all the time.

3. Decide what you want from life.

Don’t let life dictate what happens to you. No matter what situation you find yourself in, you still have an option. The only thing limiting you is your perspective and mindset.

The road toward creating the life you want for yourself begins with believing you can do it. I don’t want to be airy-fairy but you can’t be what you can’t see in your mind.

So this is the time. List out what you want from life.

Your list doesn’t have to be perfect or fully formed. Pause the judgment of whether this is realistic or silly. That can come later. Just focus on putting your ideas out there and seeing what patterns start to emerge from your answers.

You might get it wrong. And that’s okay. You have a new day with a new set of potential decisions.

“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” — Theodore Roosevelt

4. Action.

The hardest step. This requires commitment and consistency. Traits that are easy to say but hard to cultivate. This is the step most people will falter or not take at all.

Action is a clear indication that you are committed to executing your vision. But it comes with risk. Taking action means you are taking responsibility. And taking responsibility is acknowledging the role you play in your life. Both the good and the bad.

Most people want to change their life for the better but are unwilling to go through the legitimate pain and suffering required to do so. If it were easy, everyone would change their lives for the better.

How can you start to take action? Use an implementation intention: Name a time, date and duration that you will spend taking action.

The only way to start taking action is to get specific. Clarity produces consistency. Ambiguity produces excuses.

When I wanted to start to read more books in 2018, I would wake up at 5:00 am every day to read books for an hour. Call this extreme but it was effective. I read 52 books in one year and have continued to do so every year since.

Taking action can be the hardest change to make, but also the most rewarding.

5. Identity Change

You don’t want to just stop curating, you want to be someone who is a creator. Behavior change follows your actions. And actions are driven by your identity.

When you start to identify as a creator rather than the curator of your life, you start to think differently. You start to take different a course of action. It sounds almost too simple but it works.

I didn’t want to just read more books, I wanted to become a reader. Once I identified as someone who reads more books, I had to take the action to reinforce that identity. You become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What do readers do? They read. What do creators do? They create.

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