When I went to see Lana Del Rey at Wembley Stadium a few weeks ago, I became transfixed by a woman sitting next to me. She was filming whenever I glanced over, which wasn’t unusual: lots of people had their phones out. I recorded more than a few clips myself, even while feeling a little uneasy I was failing to “live in the moment”. But this woman wasn’t filming Lana Del Rey. She was filming herself: beaming into the camera, screaming with exaggerated joy and singing along to the lyrics, rarely even glancing up at the stage. Even on the rare occasions she wasn’t filming, she was watching her own videos back and smiling fondly (I realise that, having spent so much time watching this woman watching herself, the joke is really on me). 

This incident crystallised a feeling I’ve been having for a while now: everyone is both content creator and their own demanding client. At any tourist attraction, music event or vaguely buzzy hotspot, you get the sense that people are working; there’s a sense of slightly frenzied industry as they photograph and film themselves, like they’ve been sent there with deliverables and a quota to hit. You can see the same poses, the same set-ups and the same wide smiles which, if not exactly fake, dissipate once the cameras are put away. 

This all feels like a curmudgeonly complaint (and far from an original one), like the kind of thing that you’d see in a Facebook cartoon in 2013 – these youths and their damn selfies! It’s young women in particular who have been most heavily criticised for this behaviour. But where I differ from previous curmudgeons is that I don’t think this phenomenon is specific to young people and certainly not to women – it was a middle-aged man who recently broke a chair in a Van Gogh museum while posing for a selfie. There were only slightly fewer people filming content at the Neil Young concert I went to last weekend (median age: I’m going to say 55) than there were at the Lana Del Rey gig I attended the previous weekend (median age: 24). Everyone is a content creator today, regardless of gender or generation. I also don’t really think it’s a problem, but I have lately become curious about why we act like this, even if that seems like such an obvious question. When we stage little photo shoots on holiday, when we film ourselves at galleries and gigs, what are we actually getting from it? If we’re not getting paid, who are we trying to impress?

Maybe we‘ve just been watching this kind of content for so long that we’ve started to see it as the normal way to behave. It comes naturally to us; it’s no longer just a performance

Of course, some people are acting like content creators because they actually want to be content creators (you can’t really become an influencer without acting like one first – no brand is going to take a chance on a plucky account with 200 followers) or because they’re chasing some kind of material reward. There are a few jobs today which don’t benefit from an active online presence, and you’ll find bankers, lawyers, hairdressers and electricians all posting very similar forms of shareable content in the hope of building their profile and securing new clients. But for the most part, I think this behaviour is driven by something more intangible – it’s just the modern-day version of keeping up with the Joneses, a bid for the same kind of “cultural capital” which has long driven sales of sports cars, expensive watches, wine-tasting courses and foreign holidays. 

As understood by Pierre Bourdieu – a French theorist and one of the people who coined the term in his 1979 book Distinction – the point of cultural capital was that it was convertible into actual capital (ie cold hard cash). Taking a wine-tasting course or having the right art prints on your wall might pay off if it meant you could impress someone – your boss, a wealthier neighbour – who could help you to advance your career or introduce you to other people who could. Today, when more people do precarious, casualised and freelance work, that underlying principle is even more relevant: portraying yourself online as someone who is fun, affable, culturally literate and already successful could send more opportunities your way. While we may not be thinking about this in a conscious or calculating way (I don’t think many of us are), it could still be an ambient incentive which shapes how we behave. 

“I don’t think this stuff can be easily traced back to financial remuneration – there’s a big question of validity as well here,” Natalie Olah, a journalist, the author of Bad Taste: Or the Politics of Ugliness (and someone who actually understands Bourdieu), tells me over the phone. “There’s quite a widespread delusion that anything outside of the spectacle doesn’t exist – if we can’t see something, it’s not happening, and as soon as we can see it, it becomes a reality.  So when you see people acting in ways that emulate the codes or conventions of the influencer, there’s probably just a desire to feel as though they exist”. In other words, online visibility has become a source of meaning and value – if you’re not seen, you don’t matter. Alongside this desire for recognition, maybe we‘ve just been watching this kind of content for so long that we’ve started to see it as the normal way to behave. It comes naturally to us; it’s no longer just a performance.

It’s no business of mine how other people choose to represent themselves online, but I do know that I have been happier and more relaxed when I haven’t been focused on curating my life for an audience of people who, in all probability, don’t really care. If producing and broadcasting content of yourself is starting to feel like work, if you ever find yourself feeling anxious that you haven’t hit your imaginary targets, if you’re more focused on your own reflection than the activity you have paid money to enjoy, then it might be worth asking whether you’d have a better time without it.