The Pressure of Visibility
Life was about becoming. Now it is about being seen. Life was about interior richness. Now it is about exterior validation.
I have always found it fascinating and powerful to observe self worth through the lens of time. While self worth may be timeless, its expression has changed drastically over time. In other words, it has always been orchestrated by the values of the era.
Today, we are witnessing an era that I like to call “The Performance of Presence.”
Welcome to the age of exposure, where visibility is the currency of value. Social media has introduced us to a new set of beliefs, as if the ones we already carry weren’t enough! If you are not seen, you do not exist.
This article came to me as an inspiration while I was having dinner with some people. One guy, who presents himself as a creative director; told me, or worse, announced, that if my Instagram account is private, that if I don’t create content to entertain people, I am invisible. I am no one.
He spoke with the confidence of Newton discovering gravity. And he paused, looking at me sharply waiting for me to entertain his illusion; he didn’t know that I am an artist. I turn illusions into alchemy. I alchemize the moment into meaning. And just like any creative, my curiosity was in motion to create an editorial piece out of this encounter to unveil all the layers of this conversation; The Pressure of Visibility.
Under this title, I want to explore how social media, marketing, and self worth have merged into one endless staged performance.
I am a true believer in one’s personal journey of self discovery, as this journey unveils many layers to who we truly are, why we are here, what we want to do, or who we want to become. And this journey is very subjective. No one gets to dictate upon us our own mission statement. And the more we walk through the self discovery path, the more worthiness we are going to invite into our lives.
Yet today, social media has rewired how we define who we are. Self-worth was once rooted in essence, values, beliefs, but now it has been outsourced to metrics. How many followers? How much reach? How many views? Did it go viral? What are the chances? The digital gaze has created an identity crisis among people.
Life was about becoming. Now it is about being seen. Life was about interior richness. Now it is about exterior validation. When I say “life was” I don’t aim at showing that the past didn’t have its own challenges of visibility and pressure to prove something, but the past wasn’t as loud as today. Wasn’t as fast as today. And this is clearly portrayed in the dynamics of marketing as one campaign is not enough, one product is absolutely not enough. And within the same campaign one face is never enough. There has to be many faces. We see this everyday. How many times do we scroll through our feed and see different influencers talking and unpacking the same product; saying the same product description, or worse, the scripted product’s promise to give us a free pass to self worth. Because yes, makeup primers or face cleansers, through history, have proven to get us out of our identity crisis. Let's be frank, brands have cracked the code of cultural manipulation. All they do is send products to influencers and voila. You know the rest. Mission accomplished. With all the content being created online, we are not witnessing creativity, we are watching compliance with a marketing brief.
In a world where everyone is publishing themselves, we are under pressure to become brands, not human beings. The greatest masquerade of the century. This is the identity crisis of our time; the dissonance between who we are internally and what feel compelled to present externally. We are trapped in a loop of performance. Visibility has become a market. Influence is a commodity. And self worth? It is being auctioned at the intersection of content and commerce.
This is the identity crisis of the century. Not the absence of self; but the overload of personas demanding an online presence to prove they are worth of something. The pressure of visibility will eventually keep generating different personas until one day the original identity disappears beneath the noise and chaos.
And no one has the courage to openly ask; if I stop being seen, do I still matter?
Heavens, yes. But few today dare to live as if that were true.
Self worth is not meant to be staged and true worth doesn’t beg for attention. No one needs to be seen to exist. Perhaps the most radical act today to step off the stage and live a life that doesn’t need an audience. And I believe, this is the only performance worth giving.