Two years ago, at 19, my daughter deleted her social media accounts. This is a kid who had lived on Facebook and Snapchat and all the rest, and then… poof, not just inactive, but Gone. She says she wants to stop worrying about the personna she was crafting for the world. But I suspect, as well, that she’s discovering the benefit of undersharing.

Two illustrative anecdotes and a spot of musing:

About fifteen years ago I was writing in a coffee shop. A couple sat down behind me. When you write in a public place you get used to tuning out the sounds of the people around you, but some times the pitch of a voice will grab and hold your attention. I didn’t mean to listen, but I got sucked in by the tone, then the words. They were getting divorced. They had chosen the cafe as a neutral place, and they were there to divvy up their property. They were trying their best to keep their voices low and their manner civil. If others in the cafe were listening, they gave no sign of it; neither did I. We all, speakers and auditors, pretended they were alone. After about an hour and a half the couple finished their negotiations, said awkward goodbyes, and left.

I don’t remember a thing they said, but I remember the event as clear as day.

Fifteen years later: I was at my haircutters this fall to get the blue streak in my hair refreshed. There was a delay–something had gone wrong with the prior client’s hair color, the stylist had had to re-do it, and now–the stylist’s helper looked a little nonplussed. Because of the delay, the client, who had to catch a flight, was doing her performance review via Skype. In the salon. “Come in and we’ll get started, but it’s a little… weird.”

It was: at the point where I took my seat, the other client, her hair in foils, was sitting in the chair next to mine (the salon is tiny). She looked about 24, had her laptop open, and was video-chatting with complete unselfconsciousness about her progress at her company, mentioning the projects she’d been involved in, getting in a dig at a co-worker. She finished up with a sort of up-voiced interrogatory: she’d been at the company for over six months, wasn’t it time to take the next step?

The woman she was addressing very kindly but firmly pointed out that six months is not a very long time; that a promotion was not guaranteed after six months, that while some of the progress she spoke of had been noted by her colleagues and supervisor, she had some other areas that needed work, that…. well, the promotion wasn’t coming just yet. It was hard for her to hear. It was awkward for us to hear.

The change that came over the young woman was subtle; she had had no problem carrying on what, at work, would have been a confidential conversation held behind closed door, in front of three strangers, until it went in a direction she had not anticipated. The meeting ended and she closed her laptop; the foils were removed and her hair dried and styled, and she left to catch a flight. Apparently she never came back to the salon.

Life is lived very publicly these days. For writers, who are told that Establishing a Media Presence is a requirement, it can be just another writing exercise. But when even middle schoolers worry about crafting an online persona*, the world has moved well past my mother’s adjuration not to tell Other People the family’s concerns. We’re all awfully comfortable with taking up, not just our own space, but the space of the people around me. I tend to lower my voice if I’m talking on a cell phone in public–both for the sake of my own privacy and so as not to thrust my business on the people sitting nearby. Not so the woman two seats away from me on BART who was chatting animatedly with someone about her visit to the gynecologist.

“A life lived out loud”, as a phrase, suggests courage, not being squashed by societal expectations–being who you are unapologetically. I’m totally on board with that: I’m old enough to remember a culture of conformity which extended well past the era of the hippie and letting it all hang out. What I’m talking about is different: it’s acting as if the world around you is either an audience or a set. With the couple in the cafe they were painfully aware that they were in public, and tried their best to keep from making the other denizens part of it. With the young woman at my haircutter’s, she was okay with all of us being her audience–until the discussion went in a direction she wasn’t expecting. And the woman on BART? I think, to her, that the world around her was one big sound stage.

*https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/05/well/family/the-unspoken-rules-kids-create-for-instagram.html?_r=0