On Not Posting About It

There is a kind of experience that does not survive being posted about. The slow Sunday lunch with the person you have known for fifteen years. The walk in the woods that produced no usable photograph. The book that changed your year. The grief, in the months it was actually happening. Each of these has, in the moment, a particular shape. The shape is private. The shape is fragile. The shape does not survive contact with the audience.

When you post about an experience, you do not preserve it. You translate it. The translation has its own logic. The translation is in the dialect of the platform. It has to be readable in three seconds. It has to be commendable. It has to fit into the genre the audience expects. The translation, in other words, is shaped by people who were not there, for the benefit of people who will scroll past it in under a second.

After the post, the original shape is harder to recover. The next time you think about the lunch, your memory will lean toward the photograph of the lunch, not the lunch itself. The next time you think about the walk, you will think about the version you posted, not the version that happened. The translation has overwritten the source.

There is, of course, a reason people post about things. The post documents. The post tells far-away friends what is going on. The post is sometimes a way of joining a particular community in a particular moment. None of this is wrong. The point is not that posting is bad. The point is that posting has costs that are not visible in the moment of posting.

A useful rule: when something good happens, wait. Not forever. Until the next day, often. Until the urge to translate has subsided. By the next day, you will be able to tell whether the post was for documenting, for sharing with one person, or for the small ego reward of being seen. The three motivations look the same from the inside. They look different on a delay.

Many of the things that, in the moment, you wanted to post about, you will not want to post about on the delay. This is good information. The delay was deciding for you. The lunch will have settled into a memory that you would rather keep than convert.

The rule is not abstinence. The rule is editorial judgment. Some things should be posted. The wedding, the new book, the dog. Some things should be told to one person, in a sentence, by text. Some things should not be told at all, because the telling will spoil the having.

The unposted experience does not disappear. It is, in fact, easier to remember. The brain does not file it under the label of the post. It files it under the label of the original. Years later, you will be able to find it, and the texture will still be there, because no one polished it in the meantime.

Some of the most important hours of any year should not be on the internet. This is not a moral position. This is a practical one. Keep some hours back.

<!-- beal:expanded:v1 -->

The not-posting is also a small generosity to the people in your life. The friend who does the same thing you did, two weeks later, does not have to compete with the photo of your version. The sibling who is going through a harder year is spared the small thumbnail of yours. Most of the people in your feed are quietly grateful for the things their friends do not post, even if they would never articulate the gratitude.

There is a particular category of un-posted experience that deserves its own line. The trip you took that turned out to be hard. The dinner that did not go as planned. The anniversary that arrived in a difficult year. These do not belong on the feed. They belong in the notebook, the private conversation, the long letter to the friend who has earned the difficult version. The feed will get the polished version, if anything. Most of the time it should get nothing.

Some readers will object that posting is how distant friends stay in touch. This is partly true and mostly false. Distant friends stay in touch through messages, calls, the occasional letter. The feed is not 'staying in touch.' The feed is a small advertisement of the self, scrolled through by distant acquaintances. Staying in touch happens off the feed. The off-feed contact is rarer and more demanding, and exactly because of that, more durable.

The practice gets easier with time. The first month feels like restraint. The third month feels like preference. The first year feels like a habit of mind. After a year of consistent not-posting, the small daily reach for the camera begins to disappear, and the experiences begin to feel slightly larger, because they are not being narrowed in real time to a single frame.

The unposted experience also tends to be remembered longer. The brain, having not been outsourced to the photo, does its actual work. The memory is stored differently. The texture is preserved. A trip that did not become a photo album five years ago can still, with small effort, be reconstructed in some detail from the memory. A trip that became a careful set of photographs five years ago is largely the photographs now; the felt memory has been quietly replaced by the captured frames. The replacement is not free. The photograph is a shorthand, and shorthands always lose information. Choose the small inefficiency. Let some experiences live only in the brain. The brain, given the responsibility, does better with it than the cloud does, and the un-posted memory carries the year more honestly than any small thumbnail ever will.

End the next genuinely good experience without a photograph. Notice how the experience feels in the absence of the small documentary impulse. The absence is usually not bereaved. The absence is, more often, a small relief, like the relief of leaving a coat at the door of a warm restaurant. The experience continues without you having to record it, and you, freed from the recording, continue inside it more fully. The trade is small. The trade is also, over time, surprisingly consequential.