I picked that photo out of about forty.
It’s a good one. I’m not in a bad mood in it, and the light’s doing me a favor. The other thirty-nine are still sitting on my phone, and in most of them I look exactly like a man who’s had the year I’ve had.
That isn’t lying. Everybody does it. I run the accounts for this show, so I’m not standing above any of this.
But somewhere in there is what people are actually asking when they type in how to be more real.
Being real isn’t the opposite of posting
The usual answer is that social media is fake and life is real, so post less and you’ll be more genuine. I don’t think that holds up.
People were doing this long before phones. Church clothes. The good living room nobody was allowed to sit in. “We’re doing great, thanks.” The feed didn’t invent any of it. It just handed everybody a stage and a counter that goes up.
So “delete the app and find your true self” isn’t much of an answer. Plenty of people have a quiet phone and still can’t say how they are.
The question that actually sorts it
There’s a question that keeps turning up around this one, and I can’t shake it.
Would you have done it if nobody would ever know?
That does more work than any tip I’ve read. Not as a guilt trip. As a way of sorting.
The dinner. The trip. The new thing you were pleased with. If you’d still have done it with the camera off and nobody ever finding out, then it’s yours. If you wouldn’t have, then it wasn’t really the dinner you wanted.
I’ve run my own week through that a few times now. It isn’t comfortable. Some of it holds up fine. Some of it turns out to have been for an audience I couldn’t even name.
Then it follows you off the app
This is the part I didn’t see coming.
You don’t only perform where the audience is. After long enough you start carrying the audience around with you. You catch yourself narrating a Tuesday afternoon that nobody is watching. You have a bad week and your first thought is how it would sound if you said it, instead of how it actually feels.
That’s the real cost. Not the filters. The fact that the editing suite stays open even when you’re on your own in the car.
Careful, though: being real became a genre too
Here’s where I want to be honest about something.
“Being real” is a style now. There’s a whole way of posting that looks like honesty and is staged just as carefully as anything else. The confession with good lighting. The hard thing shared at exactly the point it stopped being hard, tied off with what it taught them.
I’m wary of it, and I’m wary of this show turning into it. If something is genuinely raw, it usually isn’t shareable yet. That’s how you can tell.
Oversharing isn’t the same as being real. Half the time it’s the same performance in a different outfit.
Where the real stuff actually happens
Almost always somewhere small, with nobody watching.
One person. Usually not a big moment either. Usually just the answer to “how are you” coming out a bit more honest than it normally would, which is enough to change the shape of the next ten minutes.
Nobody sees those. They don’t post well. There’s nothing to screenshot. And that’s the whole trick of it: the real stuff has no reach, which is exactly why so many of us are convinced everyone else has got something we haven’t.
What you’re really asking for
I don’t think most people searching this want to be more authentic in some general way. I think they want one place where they don’t have to do the bit.
That’s a smaller thing to ask for, and a much more possible one. One person. One conversation. Being a bit straighter than usual and seeing what happens.
I’ve written separately about how that goes with the people already in your life, which is where most of us have to start.
That’s the whole reason I’m making this. Ordinary people, on the record, saying the thing they’d normally edit out, with no lesson stapled to the end of it.
If there’s something you’ve never said out loud, the guest chair is open. If you’d rather just listen for now, the list hears every episode before the feed does.