【外刊精读】拒绝共享的生存智慧
2025-07-08 21:18:48 # 考研英语 # 外刊

It’s a typical Monday morning.

You wake up, reach for your phone, and within seconds, you’re scrolling through an endless stream of updates.

Your college roommate has a new puppy.

Your aunt’s dog just died.

Your coworker made homemade sourdough bread.

Your second cousin just broke up with their partner.

Very, very publicly.

And before long, you’re adding to the noise.

You’re posting about your early morning fog, your seasonal depression, that crushing existential dread.

Etc.

Without realizing it, you’ve consumed and shared more personal information with the people in your life before your first cup of coffee than your grandparents did in a month.

It’s all painfully, intensely human.

That’s not always a good thing.

This constant input and output of information, this ceaseless sharing of our lives, has become so normalized that we barely notice it anymore.

It seems like innocuous behavior.

But there are psychological, social, and emotional consequences that we’re only beginning to understand.

From the earliest cave paintings to our ancestors’ oral storytelling traditions, we’ve always found ways to communicate our experiences to others.

Social media has amplified this urge to unprecedented levels.

With just a few taps on a screen, we can instantly share our thoughts, feelings, and experiences with hundreds or even thousands of people.

It’s a power that would have seemed almost godlike just a few decades ago.

As the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility.

And just to rip the band-aid right off — it’s a responsibility that many of us are ill-equipped to handle.

We tear ourselves apart, we spiral — and then spiral over our spiraling.

We don’t know how or when to stop.

In the pre-digital age, privacy was the default state.

Sharing information required effort — writing a letter, making a phone call, or having a face-to-face conversation.

Now, privacy requires effort.

We have to actively choose not to share, to resist the temptation to post, to keep our thoughts and experiences to ourselves.

This reversal has profound implications.

When sharing is the default, we share without thinking, flooding our networks with a constant stream of information.

Some of it’s harmless, sure.

So much of it is deeply personal, our darkest moments, our fears, our compulsive thoughts.

Relationships are strained or ended because of misinterpreted tweets.

Reputations are damaged by ill-considered updates.

These are not hypothetical scenarios — they’re the reality for a lot of folks who have fallen victim to their own oversharing.

And the risks aren’t just external.

When we’re always performing for an audience, always curating our experiences for public consumption, we’re losing touch with ourselves.

Think about the last time you had a meaningful experience.

Even just a moment you want to remember.

Did you immediately reach for your phone to share it?

And, in that moment of sharing, did you fully experience the event itself?

Or were you already thinking about how to frame it for your followers?

This constant curation of our lives for public consumption creates a dangerous feedback loop.

We don’t value experiences for their intrinsic worth — we value them solely for their shareability.

We judge our lives by how they look to others, not by how they feel to us.

The answer to all of this is simpler than you think: start a journal.

Groundbreaking, I know.

Journaling is nothing new, of course.

People have been keeping diaries and journals for centuries.

In the oversharing era, the humble journal takes on new significance.

Journaling itself becomes a radical act of privacy, a deliberate choice to keep our thoughts and experiences to ourselves.

I think of my journal as my private social media feed, one where I’m the only follower.

Like a social media platform, it’s a place for me to share my thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

Unlike social media, there’s no pressure for me to perform, no need to curate, no risk of oversharing.

Journaling provides a different kind of satisfaction.

There’s no immediate feedback, no external validation.

Instead, the reward comes from the act of writing itself, from the clarity and insight we gain through self-reflection.

It’s a slower, more subtle form of gratification.

And that matters.