I have been writing on this blog since 2013, and for a good part of that time I was also watching the numbers, which is an awkward admission for a man who tells people he writes for himself. So the question I keep returning to this year is whether I would still do any of it if nobody could see me doing it, and I mean the writing and the tinkering and the long drives, not only the parts I already suspect are performance.

I do not read this as a question of moral integrity. It sits closer to a question of desire, which is whether I want the thing itself or I want to be the kind of person who does the thing.

Most people avoid asking it because the answer is usually uncomfortable. Would you still be burning yourself out if people were indifferent to your accomplishments? Would you still run if you could not put it on Strava? Would you buy it if it told nobody anything about you? I have been guilty of all three.

The irritation of watching someone film themselves crying is a useful clue, and so is the person holding a phone through an entire concert instead of being at it. We have gotten very good at living things for an audience, and an experience now has to be quantified and improved on or it does not seem to count, so the act gets downgraded into a clip or a number. In India we had a head start on this with the wedding video, and now the whole life is the wedding video.

None of that makes excellence a bad thing, because watching a figure skater or a chef in a flow state is genuinely inspiring. What goes wrong is when the pursuit becomes secondary to being seen as a person who pursues. There is a difference between being absorbed in a craft and being absorbed in the image of yourself doing the craft, and Simone Weil had the sharpest version of it when she argued that real attention to something requires the removal of the self. That is exactly what vanishes when you narrate your joy to a camera or step out of an emotion to film it. Being proud of beating your own record is fine. It goes wrong when posting it matters more than the good feeling, and the representation of the experience starts to outweigh the experience.

I do not think this is only vanity. The need to signal that we are living well comes from a deeper discomfort with life as it is, and if you cannot tolerate the feeling that something is missing, you become available to anything that promises to make you whole. That discomfort is everywhere now, between the uncertainty ahead, the state of the world, the poverty outside your gate and the information firehose that leaves you overstimulated by nine in the morning. We treat the discomfort as a personal malfunction, which is exactly what self-help and positive psychology sell back to us. If you are unhappy, the problem is that you are not thinking positively enough.

So we borrow completeness from people who look like they have figured it out, through objects that signal a personality. My generation has ready-made versions of this, the wellness devotee, the spiritual one, the traveller, the digital nomad, each with its own aesthetics and vocabulary and places and routines, sold as the answer to the discomfort and never delivering. We have our own Indian edition too, the Rishikesh retreat, the Himalayan nomad with a MacBook, the crypto bro who discovered stoicism. What gets missed is that the people who look figured out do not share the objects or the routines. They share a strange transparency where you see the habits and the private matters but never a real day. Selling a lifestyle to unhappy people is very easy business for that reason.

Overwork is the other popular answer. You can genuinely master a craft and still be chasing the status of being someone who works hard, and I have met plenty of people in professions that work much harder than tech ever did and never once announce it. Overconsumption and overwork are not the opposites they appear to be either, because the overworker who succeeds tends to buy the exact status symbols he imagined a successful person owns.

All of these proxies add up to an identity that needs maintaining, and the maintenance is a surveillance you run on yourself. The attempts to measure a life keep failing, and the living is the part that gets skipped. Even rest has to be productive now, hobbies have to make money or serve something beyond the flow state, and friendships and partnerships have to serve goals.

This is where Ram Dass keeps coming back to me. Be Here Now is the title of his 1971 book, written after he went from being Richard Alpert, a Harvard psychologist, to a student of Neem Karoli Baba in India, and the whole teaching is more or less in the title. Held next to everything above, every trap starts to look like a way of leaving the present. The performer lives in the imagined reaction of a future viewer, the optimiser lives in the next number, the aspirational buyer lives in the person they will become once they own the thing, and the overworker lives in the day he finally arrives. Even the person filming the concert is already watching it as footage, remembering it while it happens.

The caution applies to me as much as anyone, which is that be here now becomes a caption and a tote bag very quickly. The moment presence is something to display, you are back inside the same trap in a calmer colour, and the question works as a quiet check on that too.

There is also a growing entitlement to a life without friction, usually dressed up as beauty or ease, where everything owes us easy consumption and immediate gratification and we drop whatever does not deliver. This has made us worse at relationships and lonelier as a result. Relationships have friction and we need it, and if you doubt that, watch how fast an evening goes with someone you love. A sycophantic chat interface cannot give you that, and most of us are spending more time with one than we admit. Positive psychology also told a generation to cut off toxic relationships, and I wonder how many of those were genuinely toxic. We will never know. Ram Dass has a line I love, that we are all just walking each other home, and you cannot really do that with someone while you are optimising the walk.

What has helped me is boring. I ask whether I would still do the thing if nobody watched, and then I buy less and travel less and I stopped filming things. I fight for the relationships I have, I do something about the causes I care about instead of posting about them, and I no longer expect myself to be happy or productive all the time, because that expectation was doing most of the damage. I still enjoy a lot of things. I just stopped performing them, and it is not perfect, it is a process.

If you have caught yourself performing something you used to simply enjoy, tell me what it was, I am @troysk704.