Open your Instagram or TikTok on any given day, and you will be unable to avoid an army of fashion influencers standing in front of their cameras in nothing but their underwear. The stated goal of these "Get Ready With Me" videos is to demonstrate style—showing how a specific top pairs with a certain set of pants. Yet, it begs an uncomfortable question: why must the casual viewer sit through the intimate prelude of them dressing themselves? What once was a deeply private, personal ritual has been transformed into a public exhibition for no discernible reason. If the goal is purely to showcase an outfit, they could easily hit record after they are fully dressed.

Instead, these creators choose to put their unclad bodies on display, presumably because they look good enough to show off. But they are not doing the rest of us any favours. By flashing their undergarments to the camera, they immediately set up a toxic comparison pool for their followers. While these influencers often wrap the practice in a false narrative—claiming that stripping down proves they are "just like anyone else"—this is not some equalising display of body confidence. Nobody asked for it. It is merely a calculated opening act designed to hook attention by trading basic human privacy for algorithmic engagement. Nobody, it seems, is living life without oversharing. If they are not sharing their own GRWM type reels, they are busy watching someone else’s.

This trend is a symptom of a much deeper shift in modern psychology. We live in an era where the ancient philosophical command to "know thyself" has been subtly replaced by a modern imperative: display thyself. Every day, billions of people wake up, unlock their smartphones, and peer into a digital mirror. But this mirror does not merely reflect our image back to us. It shapes, molds, and recalibrates how we evaluate our worth, how we process our failures, and how we treat our own minds.

What began as a tool for connection has evolved into a profound psychological architecture. It dictates the terms of how we perceive who we are. By turning the deeply private act of living into a public performance, social media has fundamentally changed how we treat ourselves. It has shifted our focus from internal growth to external metrics, transformed genuine self-care into a marketable commodity, and turned our minds into hyper-monitored corporations.

Seeking approval

For generations, the human relationship with the self was forged in quiet moments of solitude. Journal entries, long walks, and uninterrupted daydreams allowed individuals to process complex emotions away from the judging eyes of the tribe. In these private spaces, people learned to sit with their flaws, heal from their mistakes, and develop an internal moral compass.

Social media dismantled these quiet zones. Today, when we experience a milestone, a heartbreak, or even a quiet moment of beauty, our first instinct is often to capture and broadcast it. The implications of this shift are profound. We are transforming from independent individuals into curators of our own lives. We are constantly managing a brand for an audience of peers, strangers, and algorithms.

When we view ourselves through the lens of an audience, our self-treatment changes in several critical ways:

The quantifiable moments: We begin to score our experiences. A beautiful sunset or a hard-earned achievement loses value if it fails to perform well online. We treat our accomplishments not as personal victories, but as content that requires validation through likes, views, and comments.

The fractured identity: This creates a painful split between what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called our habitus—our deeply ingrained, real-world self—and our online image. We suffer a divide between the polished online persona and the messy, anxious human being sitting on the couch. The wider this gap grows, the more we reject our true selves. We end up loving the avatar we created while loathing the person we actually are.

No processing time: When every free moment is filled with scrolling, we rob our brains of the downtime needed to process difficult emotions. Instead of treating our sadness or anxiety with gentle curiosity, we smother it with a fresh dopamine hit from a trending video.

By constantly looking outward for approval, we forget how to validate ourselves from within. We treat ourselves like politicians on a permanent campaign trail, constantly checking the polling data of notifications to see if we are allowed to feel good about who we are. We forget to consider: are we that important?

The social media “cave”

The second profound shift is the illusion of a "standard" lifestyle. Human beings are evolutionarily wired to compare themselves to others to fit into a community. For centuries, that comparison pool was small: your neighbours, your classmates, or your coworkers. You compared your reality to their reality.

Social media expanded that small pool into a global arena of billions. In doing so, it resurrected an ancient psychological trap first described by the philosopher Plato in his Allegory of the Cave.

Plato described prisoners chained inside a dark cave, forced to look at a blank wall. Behind them, a fire burns, and puppeteers carry shapes across the light, casting shadows onto the wall. Having never seen anything else, the prisoners believe those flickering shadows are reality itself. As Plato observed, "The truth would be to them just nothing but the shadows of the images." They praise those who understand the shadows best, unaware that they are worshiping mere illusions.

Today, the smartphone screen is our cave wall. The algorithmic feeds act as the fire, and influencers, brands, and peers are the puppeteers casting highly stylised, deeply curated shadows of human existence. We sit in the digital dark, staring at a screen, mistaking these filtered illusions for the true standard of life.

We are not comparing our messy mornings to our neighbour’s messy mornings. We are comparing our ordinary, unedited lives to a shadow world of attractive, and performatively happy people on Earth. This constant exposure creates a quiet, ongoing trauma of perceived inadequacy. Instead of accepting our lot in life, we are relentlessly correcting our reality to match someone else’s.

Living a myth

Under the influence of these digital shadows, we no longer treat ourselves as human beings to be nurtured. Instead, we view ourselves as commodities to be optimised. This mirrors what French philosopher Michel Foucault called the "technologies of the self"—the ways in which modern society conditions us to monitor, manage, and regulate our own bodies and minds to match rigid social standards.

We are bombarded with content telling us how to optimise our sleep, our diets, our careers, our morning routines, and even our spiritual lives.

If we wake up tired and achy, we don't treat ourselves with compassion; we view it as a failure of our routine. If we feel sad, we assume we haven't bought the right journal or followed the right wellness influencer. We treat our natural human variances—our bad days, our soft bodies, our normal periods of grief or stagnation—as defects that need to be fixed.

The commodity of self-care

Perhaps the greatest irony of the digital age is what has happened to the concept of self-care. True self-care is often difficult, boring, and imperceptible. It looks like setting boundaries, saying no to people, paying off debts, going to therapy, or getting to bed on time. It is a quiet, radical commitment to your own well-being.

Social media has repackaged this deep, internal work into an expensive aesthetic. Karl Marx coined the term commodity fetishism to describe how modern markets strip the human reality out of things and replace them with a price tag. Online, "treating yourself" has been commodified into buying luxury skincare, taking photos at expensive wellness retreats, or purchasing organic green juices.

This commercialisation tricks us into practicing a shallow version of kindness, and ultimately signing up for retail therapy. When we feel burned out by a hyper-competitive world, we are told to buy something to fix it. We treat the symptoms of our digital exhaustion with consumer goods, rather than addressing the root cause: our fractured attention and constant self-judgment.

Under the spotlight

When the phone camera is pointing at you or you are posting to your feed, you question yourself: Am I posing right? Is this caption safe? Will they judge me?

We have traded our private lives for a non-stop, global audition.

In a traditional theater, the actor performs under blinding spotlights, unable to see the audience sitting in the dark. Social media has built this permanent stage right inside our minds. The spotlights are our smartphone screens, and the invisible audience is the collective gaze of our follower list, our peers, and the faceless algorithm. And the performance can never truly end.

We are no longer living; we are perpetually auditioning for the role of ourselves. We treat our day-to-day existence not as a private experience to be felt, but as a script to be performed:

The Internalised director: When preparing a meal, dressing for the day, or reading a book, a voice whispers, "How will this play to the crowd?" We stop experiencing the moment for its raw value and begin staging it for a potential observer.

The scripted life: We carefully monitor our thoughts, emotions, and vulnerabilities, filtering out anything that wouldn't survive a public review. The natural, messy evolution of human thought is crushed in favour of safe, sterile, and widely accepted dialogue.

Chasing the limelight: This constant performance leaves our nervous systems in a permanent state of stage fright. We treat ourselves not with the gentle ease of a creature at rest, but with the hyper-vigilance of a performer terrified of getting booed off the stage.

Reclaiming the sanctuary within

We cannot simply retreat to an analogue past and delete our profiles. The digital world is here to stay, and it offers genuine benefits of connection, learning, and community. The challenge of our time is not to destroy the digital tools, but to rebuild the boundary between our online presence and our inner sanctuary.

We can only control our own thoughts, intentions, and reactions. Writing to himself in his personal journal, Marcus Aurelius noted, "You have power over your mind -- not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength." This means you have the choice to protect your own peace even while you are getting incessant digital notifications.

We can move from passive consumption to active, conscious boundaries and build a wall between public metrics and private peace.

The first step toward healthier self-treatment is protecting our private lives. We must cultivate a practice of choosing which moments of joy or pain we post online. When you experience something beautiful—like a deep conversation with a friend, a beautiful walk, a personal breakthrough—you exercise the choice to intentionally not photograph or post it. You can keep it entirely for yourself. This small act of resistance is the ultimate rejection of the shadow world. It proves to your subconscious that your life has immense value, even when it is completely invisible to the algorithm.

We must actively reject the narrative that we are projects requiring constant fixing. Human life is cyclical, not linear. There are seasons for hustle and growth, but there are also necessary seasons for rest, wintering, and sitting still.

Treating yourself well means allowing yourself to be imperfect. It means recognizing that the human body and mind were never designed to process the unfiltered opinions, tragedies, and lifestyles of the entire planet every hour of the day. When you feel overwhelmed, look at it as a healthy response from an overloaded nervous system, rather than a personal weakness. And put that phone away.

Mirror, mirror on the wall

Social media values the loud over the quiet, the shiny over the real, and the metric over the soul. It invites us to sit in the dark of the cave, chasing shadows while trading our true self-worth for corporate validation. It is designed to always offer us a distorted view of humanity.

The ultimate act of self-care in a hyper-connected world is to look away from that screen. Take a deep breath, turn our backs on the artificial fire of the feed, and walk out into the real world.

To close the app and sit in a quiet room is to listen to the unfiltered, unquantified voice of your own mind. Only when we step away from the digital audience can we begin to treat ourselves with the deep compassion, patience, and unconditional love that we have always deserved.