You woke up this morning with some struggle of leaving the cosy blanket, had coffee. Okay, brushed your teeth and then had coffee. You spent time with your wife discussing a few things for the day: food, plan for the day and the evening, worked out, and a 100 different, small things before you left for office. Another 100 things - small or big - at work, came back home and continued doing things till you fall asleep.
You don't photograph this. Days pass. You tell one person about it, months later, over a dinner party, and they laugh or react. They tell it back to you, in a different shape, six years later. Often, you're surprised by how they remember it, right? This story becomes permanent in a way.
This is what stories look like.
You're not what you put on the social media feed. That moment of higher-order professional learnings and realisations you put on LinkedIn? No one's going to remember it 24 hours later until you keep telling people you've shared something.
There's a reason the people you find most interesting are mostly bad at posting.
See, you are a book of stories and almost all of them are not for the public. Some have not happened yet. Some moments in your life's story happened and were never told to anyone, and that is what gives them their shape.
The shift from book of your stories to calendar is the largest quiet shift of the last ten years. It is bigger than the shift from desktop to phone. It is bigger than the arrival of AI. The working person, the college kid in his hostel, employee who just joined a company, the traveller who's exploring a new trek near the city, the new mother in Bangalore, has stopped thinking of her life as a thing happening to her, and started thinking of it as a thing she is producing to share in public.
A life that is mostly posted is mostly performed. A life that is mostly performed is mostly thin, shallow. By 2030, we will look back at the years 2020 to 2026 and say, of an entire generation, that they posted the years away.
By 2029, the most charismatic people in any room will be the ones whose lives are not on the feed. Their stories will arrive slowly, and you will lean forward, because you'd not learn about their whereabouts from social media but only when you meet them, invest in them by putting the phone aside, and… talk.
This week, before Friday, do something good and tell nobody. Let the thing sit inside you for a week.