Performative Living

If the world had cameras on you twenty-four-seven we would all be better people, but the word "authentic" would vanish into thin air. Am I describing modern-day social media? Where phrases like "office siren" "coquette core" and "red tomato taxi cab theory" is just word salad and makes no sense? This extends to trends and phrases that only make sense to those performing lives they don't normally have. And while it really is that damn phone, I don't only mean social media. Performative living is exhausting because you stop experiencing life directly and start experiencing it through imagined audiences.

Growing up did you ever want to impress a cute lifeguard and do cartwheels in your tankini from Justice? On dating apps do you claim your height to be 6'5 when you are in fact the reverse? Do you post yourself at the library, take three photos and then go home? Doing such things because they look impressive can be fun when sprinkled around throughout your life, but living like this daily for the sake of an audience that is not real is exhausting. It also tends to numb you enough that you don't actually enjoy the life you are presenting anymore. I'm convinced that the 'relationship influencers' have been single for years. It broke my heart to learn Chloe Ting, my favorite COVID-phase home-workout connoisseur, had a BBL the whole time. Even in small forms, performative living also blurs the choices you would normally make—eventually you begin to choose what sounds cooler rather than what feels good.

The elephant in the blog post is that the seed of performative living is rooted in gender stereotypes, and that bleeds into everything else—including capitalism. How often have you felt pushed towards a certain lifestyle because of the body you were born into? Not necessarily because you wanted it, but because it was expected of you. Women are taught to be effortlessly beautiful—yet to achieve that beauty requires an insurmountable length of effort—, agreeable, interesting but not too loud, successful but not intimidating, desirable but not 'too much.' Men are taught to be confident, dominant, emotionally restrained, successful providers. These aren't suggestions for a pathway to a specific lifestyle, these are embedded scripts society expects you to abide by. And whether we realize it or not, we begin performing them long before we ever consciously choose who we want to be. Once you become aware of that invisible audience, it doesn't really go away, if anything it becomes more exhausting. You become aware of a certain image you want to uphold and begin filtering yourself in real time; trying to align yourself with expectations that were handed to you before you could even comprehend other choices.

Per usual a poll has been created, and shocking to no one, the answers were unanimous in the expectation to perform a certain lifestyle in order to achieve a certain goal. Some are smaller, like you want to seem more interesting so you exaggerate your nonexistent love for Old English literature, or you are like me and try to fake your love for collegiate Biology in order to earn a degree that comes with far more dollar signs. Spoiler alert: I failed and I hate biology. And some are bigger, like you oppress your voice to not upset anyone at the dinner table. I had also collected some answers regarding a compliments vs. criticism debate, where for some reason we, as people, always believe the criticism over the compliment. Partly because it's our insecurities getting validation, or you just have a gut feeling that the remitter is lying when they say they love your shoes (Regina George-esque). Compliments tend to require trust, which makes the validity behind believing the compliment, much more difficult to obtain, and way more annoying. Criticism can come from anyone and it'll sting all the same, but compliments have to come from a trustworthy source for it to do any good.

This post has become longer than I anticipated (I love it when that happens), but the main point I wanted to touch on was just how frustrating it is that you don't really notice the invisible audience until you are older. When you are growing up, everything feels natural—you don't see the boundaries or expectations shaping you because you're still inside them. It's only later when you start questioning simple things that you realize how much of your behavior was influenced by something you couldn't even see. Better late than never, I guess, but if you ever catch yourself performing more than actually enjoying your life, it might be worth asking: would I still do this if no one knew?