I caught myself doing it again the other morning. The chai had just been poured, the steam still curling off it in that lovely unhurried way, and before I had taken a single sip I reached not for the cup but for the phone. To photograph it. To straighten the spoon, tilt the saucer, find the light. The tea went lukewarm while I composed it. And the strange thing, the thing I want to be honest about, is that none of this struck me as odd until I was already doing it.
Social media did not arrive in my life with a thud. It seeped in. And over the years it has quietly rewritten the list of things I consider perfectly normal. So quietly that I only notice when I stop and read the list back to myself, the way you might re-read a contract you signed years ago and think, did I really agree to all this?
Narrating my own life as I live it
The first thing it made normal was the running commentary. Somewhere along the way a part of my mind became a small, permanent editor, watching the day go by and asking of each moment: would this make a good post? The monsoon arriving over the Mumbai rooftops. A particularly good sentence in a novel. Little Miss laughing at something only she finds funny. The editor leans forward, interested, already drafting a caption.
I do not entirely resent her, this inner editor. She has made me more observant, more grateful for ordinary beauty than I might otherwise have been. But she has also taught me to experience things at a slight remove, with one eye on the living and one eye on the telling. There is a cost to that, and I am only beginning to add it up.
Sharing the things I once would have whispered
There was a time when grief stayed inside the house. When a family worry, a difficult diagnosis, a private ache, would have travelled only as far as a trusted phone call to a sister or a friend. Now I write about these things and press publish, and somewhere a few hundred strangers read them over their own cups of tea.
I have made my peace with this, mostly. Writing the hard things down has been its own quiet medicine, and the kindness that comes back from people I will never meet, who simply say me too is real and steadying. But I will not pretend it is uncomplicated. Social media made it normal to hand over the tender, unfinished parts of yourself before you have fully understood them. To turn a wound into a post while it is still bleeding a little. Some days that is brave. Some days I wonder if it is only a habit dressed up as bravery.
Measuring my life against everyone else’s
This one I am least proud of. Social media made comparison a reflex, a thing that happens to me before I have decided to do it. I scroll, and within seconds some quiet internal ledger has opened itself and begun totting up columns. Their holiday against mine. Their child’s milestones against Little Miss’s, which arrive on their own beautiful, unhurried timetable and refuse to be ranked. Their book deals, their follower counts, their effortlessly photogenic kitchens.
Here the banker in me steps forward, because I have spent a career reading balance sheets, and I know one truth the feed conveniently hides: every account shows you its assets and quietly omits its liabilities. The highlight reel is a financial statement with the losses left off. Knowing this does not always stop the comparison. But it does, on better days, let me read the figures without feeling the FOMO.
Little Miss, and the people I would never have found
And yet. For everything it has cost me, I owe social media a genuine, un-ironic debt, and her name is at the centre of it.
When you are raising a child who speaks in gesture rather than words – in the reaching, the leaning, the whole bright machinery of her body – the world can feel very narrow. The doctors are kind but distant. The advice books are thin. And then, somewhere in the endless scroll, you find them: the other parents. Mothers in other cities, other countries, who post a small triumph or a hard night, and you realise with a rush that you are not navigating this alone after all.
I would never have found those people in my building, or my office, or my old life. Social media reached across the whole world and put a hand on my shoulder. That is not a small thing. That is, perhaps, the thing it made normal that I am most quietly grateful for: the company of strangers who understand.
Turning what I love into something that must perform
The last one crept in most recently. Once, I read books because I loved them and wrote about them because I could not help it. Now there are tags to add, pins to schedule, excerpts to stagger across platforms, affiliate links to consider. The hobby has acquired a job description.
I do not regret building the blog. But I notice how easily the joy of a thing curdles into the management of a thing. How a beloved Sunday read can start to feel like content awaiting deployment. Social media made it normal to monetise the soul’s small pleasures, and to feel faintly guilty when you simply enjoy something without making it earn its keep.
The last scroll
I am not writing this to swear off any of it. I am too fond of the bookish corners, the strangers-turned-friends, the small daily theatre of it all. But I think it is worth, every so often, reading the contract back to yourself. Noticing what you have agreed to without ever quite agreeing.
So tomorrow morning I am going to try something radical. I am going to drink the chai while it is still hot, and let the steam curl off it unphotographed, and tell no one. Some moments are meant to be spent, not posted.
The editor in my head will simply have to wait.
This post is a part of Blogchatter Blog Hop.
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