The brush rests on the edge of the water jar, a single bead of murky brown water rolling down its handle. My pulse is a frantic little drum against my ribs, the kind of rhythm I usually associate with too much coffee or reading my own symptoms online at 1 AM. The page in my journal is finished. A wash of watercolor, a few tentative lines of ink, a fern I saw on a walk. For a moment-maybe 11 seconds-there was peace in the making of it. Now, that peace is gone, replaced by a low-grade, buzzing anxiety. The work isn’t over. The real work is about to begin.
This is the great, unspoken trade we all made. We didn’t get a global village for creatives; we got a global amphitheater with millions of seats and a scoreboard that resets every minute. We were told social media would democratize creativity, but it didn’t. It turned creativity into a performance. It added the crushing weight of an audience to what should be the weightless, private act of making something with your hands for no reason other than to feel the materials and watch something new appear where there was nothing before.
The Corrosive Lens of Public Validation
I despise this entire process, by the way. I find the impulse to filter our personal outlets through the lens of public validation to be fundamentally corrosive. And yet, there I was, scrolling through filters, typing and deleting a caption that sounded just the right amount of nonchalant. We criticize the system while dutifully feeding it our most vulnerable creations. It’s the ultimate contradiction: complaining about the pressure in a perfectly composed, high-engagement post about the pressure.
I was talking about this with Aiden S., a researcher I know who studies dark patterns in user interface design. He doesn’t see it as a personal failing. “You’re not weak,” he told me, “you’re being manipulated with scientific precision.” He said the platforms are designed to transform the intrinsic reward of creation (the joy of the act itself) into a dependency on extrinsic rewards (likes, comments, shares). He explained that a single notification can trigger a dopamine release, and the unpredictable nature of it-the intermittent variable rewards-is what makes it so impossibly compelling.
Anxiety Levels: Live Performance vs. Social Media
He mentioned a study involving 231 professional musicians who reported that their required social media activity generated more anxiety than performing live for thousands of people. The stage has boundaries, a beginning and an end. The digital stage is infinite, and you are never allowed to leave it. The performance is 24/7.
When Joy Curdles into Obligation
I’ve been a casualty of this myself. A few years ago, I decided to learn the guitar. I bought a cheap acoustic and found an app. The first few days were clumsy and wonderful. The sound was terrible, my fingers hurt, but it was mine. Then I made the mistake. I decided I should document my progress on Instagram. Suddenly, it wasn’t about the feeling of a G-chord finally ringing true. It was about whether Day 11 looked and sounded better than Day 10. The camera was always there, judging. I’d spend an hour practicing, then 31 minutes trying to record a clean 1-minute clip.
There used to be amateur art clubs and knitting circles. People would bring their work, still flawed and in-progress, to a small circle of trusted peers. The feedback was gentle, the sharing was communal, and the purpose was connection, not broadcasting. It was a closed loop of encouragement. What we have now is an open firehose of judgment from 11,001 strangers and a handful of friends who are also just trying to keep up.
Closed Loops vs. Open Firehoses
vs
This constant performance fosters a crippling perfectionism. We’re so afraid of posting something with a mistake-a crooked stitch, a flat note, a wobbly line-that we sand down all the interesting, human edges. The process becomes rigid. The fear of that permanent, public mistake can be paralyzing. I’ve felt it, sketching in a notebook, my hand hovering because the moment the ink touches paper, it’s final. There’s no undo button. It’s a ridiculous amount of pressure for a doodle of a fern.
The Audience in Your Head
The audience is in your head now.
We start making things we think the algorithm will like. We choose colors that pop on a screen. We simplify our work to be immediately understood in a 1-second scroll. We are tailoring our deepest, most restorative impulses to please a machine that is programmed to value engagement above all else.
Hobbies vs. Performance Review
became
We traded our hobbies for another performance review. We traded a quiet place to recharge for a noisy place to compete. We took the one part of our lives that didn’t have a key performance indicator and we assigned it one: likes. And we are burning out on our own joy.
The Quiet Rebellion
So what’s the alternative? A digital detox? Deleting the apps? Maybe, for some. But maybe there’s a quieter, more personal form of rebellion. The act of making something and then, when it’s done, not reaching for the phone. The radical act of closing the sketchbook. Of putting the finished knitting in a drawer. Of eating the lopsided bread without documenting its crumb. It feels strange at first, almost wasteful. That training runs deep. But then a different feeling settles in. A quiet, solid satisfaction. It’s the feeling of having a secret. This fern is just for me. This song is just for these walls. This moment of creation is complete in and of itself. It needs no witness to be real.