I’m 37 and I scroll social media every day but rarely post, and maybe it’s not that I have nothing to say — it’s that I stopped wanting to perform my life for an audience that was barely watching

by Lachlan Brown | May 13, 2026, 10:52 am

Remember when social media felt fun? When we posted blurry photos from nights out without three editing apps and a committee decision on the caption?

Somewhere that shifted. Suddenly, every experience needed to be documented, optimized, and presented. Hiking wasn’t just hiking anymore – it was content. Dinner wasn’t just dinner – it was an aesthetic opportunity. Even quiet moments of reflection became fodder for inspirational posts about “grinding” or “gratitude.”

I watched myself become a curator of my own existence, constantly evaluating moments through the lens of shareability. Will this get engagement? Does this align with my personal brand? Is the lighting good enough?

The exhausting part wasn’t the posting itself. It was living life with one foot in reality and the other in this imaginary theater where everyone was supposedly watching, judging, caring about whether I chose Valencia or Clarendon for the filter.

The audience that never existed

Here’s the truth bomb that changed everything for me: Most people aren’t watching your life as closely as you think they are.

That post you agonized over for 30 minutes? People glanced at it for two seconds while waiting for their lunch order. That story you carefully crafted? It disappeared into the void along with 500 million other stories posted that day.

We’re all performing for an audience of ghosts – people who are too busy performing their own lives to really pay attention to ours.

When I was in my mid-20s, feeling lost and anxious despite doing everything “right” by conventional standards, I thought sharing my journey online would create connection. Instead, it created another layer of pressure. Not only was I struggling to figure out my life, but I was also trying to make that struggle look aesthetically pleasing and inspirationally packaged.

The Buddhist concept of “anatta” or non-self teaches us that our ego and self-image are illusions we construct. Social media takes this illusion and amplifies it, turning us into brands, content creators, and performers of our own existence.

The freedom of invisible living

When I stopped posting, something unexpected happened. Life got… quieter. Better.

Without the constant mental background process of “how will I share this?”, I started actually experiencing things. My morning runs became meditation instead of photo opportunities. Conversations with friends deepened because I wasn’t half-listening while thinking about how to summarize the interaction later.

I keep a journal now – completely private, completely honest. No performance, no curation, just real reflection. The difference between writing for myself versus writing for an audience is staggering. When nobody’s watching, you can actually be yourself.

This invisible living has taught me that most of life’s meaningful moments are inherently unshareable. The way my daughter’s tiny hand wraps around my finger. The relief after a difficult conversation. The small victory of choosing presence over scrolling. These moments lose their power when we try to package them for consumption.

Breaking the scroll addiction

But here’s my confession: I still scroll. Every single day.

The irony isn’t lost on me. I’ve freed myself from the performance but remain addicted to watching others perform. It’s like quitting smoking but still hanging out in the smoking section.

The scroll has become my default mode for in-between moments. Waiting for coffee. Commercial breaks. The three minutes before a meeting starts. My brain has been rewired to crave that constant stream of input, even though I know it adds nothing to my life.

I’ve started taking deliberate technology breaks to combat this. Phone in another room during meals. Airplane mode for the first hour after waking. These small boundaries help, but breaking a daily habit that’s been reinforced thousands of times is no joke.

What helps is remembering that every minute spent consuming someone else’s performance is a minute not spent living my own actual life. Not performing it – living it.

The real cost of digital performance

Think about the mental energy we spend on social media performance. The planning, the posting, the checking for responses, the comparing ourselves to others, the FOMO, the validation seeking.

What could we create with that energy instead?

When I founded Hack Spirit in 2016, I realized there was a gap in practical self-improvement content. But I also realized that true self-improvement happens offline, in the messy, unphotogenic moments of real growth. You can’t Instagram your way to enlightenment. You can’t post your way to peace.

The mindfulness teachings I’ve studied emphasize presence – being fully here, now, without judgment. Social media is the antithesis of this. It pulls us into the past (posting old moments), the future (planning content), and everywhere but here (scrolling through other people’s lives).

Finding meaning beyond the feed

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with what I call “intentional invisibility.” It’s not about becoming a digital hermit. It’s about choosing when and how to engage with technology on my own terms.

Some days, I leave my phone at home entirely. The first time I did this, I felt phantom vibrations in my pocket for hours. But by the end of the day, I felt more present than I had in years.

I’ve started reading actual books again. Having conversations without documenting them. Taking walks without podcasts or music. Just me and my thoughts, unfiltered and unrecorded.

The fear of missing out has been replaced by the joy of missing out. While everyone else is performing, I’m just… living. Quietly. Invisibly. Authentically.

Conclusion: the performance ends when you stop showing up

I’m 37 years old, and I’ve finally learned that the most profound moments in life happen off-camera. They happen in the spaces between posts, in the silence between stories, in the real world that exists beyond our screens.

You don’t owe anyone a performance of your life. You don’t need to justify your existence through content creation. Your worth isn’t measured in likes, shares, or follower counts.

The audience you’ve been performing for? They’re too busy performing their own show to notice if you quietly exit the stage.

So maybe it’s time to stop performing and start living. Keep scrolling if you must – I still do. But stop posting for a while. See what happens when you stop trying to prove you exist and just… exist.

The freedom on the other side of that decision might surprise you. It certainly surprised me.

Lachlan Brown

Lachlan Brown is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Brown Brothers Media, a digital publishing network reaching tens of millions of readers monthly. He holds a Graduate Diploma of Psychological Studies from Deakin University, though his real education came afterward: a warehouse job shifting TVs, a stretch of anxiety in his mid-twenties, and the slow discovery that studying the mind is not the same as learning how to live well. He started experimenting with Buddhist principles during breaks at the warehouse and eventually began writing about what he was learning. That writing became Hack Spirit, a widely read personal development site, and his book Hidden Secrets of Buddhism became a bestseller. His work breaks down complex ideas into frameworks people can apply immediately, whether they are navigating a career change, a difficult relationship, or the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it. Lachlan splits his time between Singapore and Saigon. He writes about high-performance routines, decision-making under pressure, digital innovation, and the intersection of Eastern philosophy with modern life. His perspective comes from having built things from scratch, failed at some of them, and learned that clarity comes from practice, not theory.