We Are Consuming Ourselves

What happens when Life becomes Content?

Reality has become layered in filters and deepfake content. People are consumed and overwhelmed with fake news, unreal faces, and content created to make us believe something that is unreal. We’re exhausted trying to decipher truth from “unreality”.

It’s not just fake faces and fake news. It’s fake lives. Content creators are making a living off millions of views from audiences who believe the life they portray online. Perfect couples, perfect homes, perfect families.

So are we becoming performances instead of people?

Let’s talk about identity fragmentation. Identity fragmentation is what happens when your sense of self starts to feel split, inconsistent, or disconnected.

It can feel like:

• Acting one way online but feeling another way in real life
• Changing your personality depending on who you are with
• Feeling unsure of who you “really” are
• Looking back at something you said or did and thinking, that doesn’t feel like me
• Feeling disconnected from your own thoughts, emotions, or identity

Your brain is trying to adapt to different environments. Now, this is actually normal to a degree, meaning, everyone adjusts their behavior slightly depending on who they are with. Think of how you act at work, your place of worship, in your own home, etc.

It becomes fragmentation when:

• The differences become extreme
• The versions of yourself stop feeling connected
• You lose a clear sense of your core identity

Your identity is built from memories, experiences, relationships, and beliefs about yourself. When these things don’t align, or let’s say when you feel pressure to act differently in different spaces, your brain doesn’t always integrate them smoothly. So instead of one cohesive identity, you get separate “compartments” of self.

Ok so that’s the psychology mumbo-jumbo. What does this actually mean?

Some social media platforms reward you for acting differently. Some examples are Twitch where gamers are rewarded for extreme outbursts during game play where they might even destroy keyboards or appear to lose control of their temper. Or how about those super clean homes with all the Amazon items they picked up? There have been some content creators who lift the veil and show the rest of their house, and not just one room, where it’s cluttered and “normal”.

Yet both of these cases have inspired purchases from Amazon to emulate this unsustainable and unhealthy lifestyle. They have inspired young children to play video games and scream at people playing them, becoming what the internet calls “trolls.”

“Perfect couples” smash the illusion of their fairytale with news of violence like Kayla Malec and her partner Evan Johnson, Taylor Frankie Paul, Sana Yousaf, Alexis Sharkey, Valeria Márquez.

In these cases, the most dangerous part is not only the violence. It is the illusion that everything is fine. Love is being performed while control is happening off-camera.

What is it teaching us as a society? These examples apply to everyone, not just women and young girls. Everyone is susceptible to abuse. Teaching people to cover it up and to stay quiet it taking us back to when victims endured it and put on a performance so no one would know. Hiding the bruises until the violence becomes their demise.

Let’s also dive into the horror of having fame without protection.

Famous people have money for bodyguards. Social media “fame” doesn’t come with that luxury. It leaves you open to everyone, and not everyone has good intentions. In this day and age, cyber sleuths know how to find out where you live, where you work, and where you travel. Opening yourself to others with mental instability, or a sense of entitlement to your personal life and space is also extremely dangerous.

So what happens when life becomes content?

We stop living it.

We start performing it. Editing it. Shaping it into something that can be consumed, even if it no longer resembles the truth. And somewhere in that process, something fractures slowly and quietly until you are no longer sure which version of you is real.

Read my original post here

BIO: Lisa Vasquez is a writer, artist, and editor-in-chief of Memento Mori Ink Magazine, exploring the intersections of psychology, identity, and darkness. Her work examines autonomy, grief, and the human condition through a gothic and analytical lens. She creates stories and essays that challenge perception, provoke thought, and reveal what often exists beneath the surface.