We Were Never Supposed to Be Aware of This Many People
By Nona Dimitrova published 16/01/2025
It’s 8:30am. My third alarm rings, and I pick up my phone to finally turn it off, instead of snoozing it again. I unlock my phone and check my notifications. I reply to some friends on Whatsapp and start cycling through Instagram stories. Before I’ve even really engaged my core for the first time, I’ve seen:
- Someone complaining about the Eurostar
- Someone complaining about waking up early for their job
- Someone getting engaged
- Someone’s adorable new puppy
Most of these people aren’t even close friends. They’re barely friends at all. You know more about someone you met in the smoking area of a club four years ago than your grandmother probably knew about her neighbour 20 years ago. Sharing information used to take significant effort. Dialing a number, at least.
Social media is great. It’s wonderful. It allows us to express ourselves and our opinions more openly. It allows us to gain new perspectives on different topics. It allows us to feel less lonely and find communities. But it’s also a huge, overwhelming, constant stream of information.
In 2021, Michelle Goldberg wrote a piece for The New York Times titled “We Should All Know Less About Each Other,” and she’s not wrong. Similar sentiments have been echoed by many people recently. JA Westenberg wrote a fantastic piece on Medium titled “The Art of Not Sharing.” In an interview for the Gladiator II press tour, Denzel Washington echoes that during his generation, there weren’t “9 million opinions” readily available for our digestion. We were never supposed to be aware of the existence of this many people, and we were never supposed to be aware of this many people’s opinions.
What all of these people (and ironically, perspectives) are really trying to say is that we’re too online. We share too much of ourselves. We live life through the lens of social media curation. We experience something, and our brain is automatically wired to consider how we can portray or angle this experience to our online community.
"We live life through the lens of social media curation."
I’m no different. I’m about to turn 25 in four days. Over the past year, I’ve started sharing more of my writing, and consequentially, more of myself on my social media profile, alongside my usual “photo-dumps.” What initially started out as being more vulnerable, now feels like something I *need* to do. With my quarter-century birthday slowly approaching, I caught myself curating a perfect “dump” to signify crossing this objectively insignificant threshold. Billie Eilish lyrics. Agnus Dei by Francisco de Zurbarán. The main character from “Sick of Myself” smoking a cigarette and scrolling her phone in her face cast (this one’s kind of meta, in an ironic way, I guess).
I also caught myself thinking about what the perfect slightly poetic words are to communicate this feeling of getting older while still being young. To write down in my journal where I do write down a lot of things I don’t share with anyone else), but then also to include in this dump. Something to really signify, this isn’t just a birthday dump, I’m sharing a deep and intrinsic perspective on ageing. Instead of writing something, and choosing to share it, I was forcing myself to come up with words I didn’t organically have. Losing touch with myself for the sake of performance.
“When we’re always performing for an audience, always curating our experiences for public consumption, we’re losing touch with ourselves.”
– JA Westenberg, The Art of Not Sharing
So what does this have to do with anything?
The fashion corner of social media is not small by any means. Our timelines are flooded by influencers sharing their outfit details; stylists sharing their latest work with their clients; celebrities on red carpets; and your third-grade desk-mate sharing what she wore on holiday to Turkey. Everyone’s got their toe in the water, in some way.
With that, comes a plethora of opinions too. Don’t wear this colour with this colour. Dress like your celebrity look-alike. Get your colour analysis. Don’t wear this if you’re a warm spring. Wear more of this if you’re a cool autumn. Stay away from zebra print. The perfect level of tight sheerness. How to find your personal style in 10 easy steps.
Where are we finding it? Was it ever lost in the first place? Did we misplace it?
When we do post our outfits on social media, it’s always a very specific type of outfit. It will never be the jeans and jumper you throw on to go to therapy. Or the trousers and top you put together for a chill dinner with your friend, where you know nobody will be documenting ‘content’. It’ll always be a perfectly curated outfit, which is supposed to communicate a certain type of ‘vibe’. It’s supposed to say something about you.
“Style happens as a byproduct of [you] living.”
And if we’re curating ourselves as much as I’m boldly assuming we are, then it’s safe to (again) assume that so are the people we see on our timelines. Those with hundreds of thousands of followers are too.
The same way knowing too much about everything and everyone around us can often fuel many different feelings; someone’s new job can make us question how well we’re doing career-wise. Someone’s engagement can make us feel like we’re somehow behind in life. Someone’s simple complaints can shift our mood from optimistic, to all kinds of low.
This extremely interpersonal relationship we’ve cultivated with each others’ style, as well as the sheer volume of different styles and outfits we see all the time, can also fuel feelings of inadequacy. It’s really at the root of all trends, and it always has been. Kate Moss would wear something in the early noughties, and people would buy it. But our lightning-speed access to what people are wearing and where we can buy it, only makes the whole cycle that much more unsustainable. Your mum probably had to cycle through 20 different shops, if there were even that many in her area, before finding anything remotely similar to what Kate Moss wore. Most times, she probably never did, pinned the photo on her moodboard, and called it a day. For us, that package can be lying on your doorstep within 12 hours. And now we’re a couple hundred quid poorer and ever so slightly more confused about who we really are. For what?
"Turn off the noise."
So all of this is just to say: turn off the noise. Whether we’re talking about fashion self-curation or general self-curation, give yourself space to go out and experience things without the lens of performance. I was going to say “and let me know how you get on,” but actually, maybe it’s best we keep it to ourselves, for the purpose of this article. Let your journal know how you get on :)
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