My cousin Ruma posts beautiful things. Her breakfast looks like art. Her husband gazes at her with movie-star devotion. Her children are always laughing, always clean, always in matching clothes. Looking at her feed, you would think she lives inside a greeting card.
Last month I visited her. The house was chaos. The children were screaming. Her husband sat in a corner, silent, scrolling his own phone. Ruma looked exhausted in a way her photos never show. At one point she started crying in the kitchen. “I don’t know why I’m so unhappy,” she said. “I have everything.”
But she doesn’t have everything. She has a museum. And she has forgotten that museums are not homes.
We have all become museum curators now. Our phones are galleries. Our feeds are exhibitions. Every day we select which pieces to display and which to hide in storage. The beautiful lie goes on the wall. The ugly truth stays in the basement where no one visits.
I do this too. Everyone does. Last year I went through something difficult. I won’t say what. But during that time, I posted a photo of myself smiling at a café. The coffee was photogenic. My face was carefully arranged. Someone commented, “You look so happy!” I was not happy. I was performing happiness for the museum.
The strange thing is, I knew I was lying. But the lie felt necessary. The museum demands beautiful exhibits. Nobody wants to see the real painting—the one with tears and mess and confusion. They want the edited version. The filtered version. The version that fits in a frame.
This is what we have built together. A museum with no exit.
Children grow up inside this museum now. My niece is twelve. She has never known a world where people simply lived without documenting. To her, an experience that isn’t photographed barely exists. She evaluates moments by their postability. “This would make a good story,” she says, reaching for her phone before she has finished feeling anything.
I watch her and I feel something like grief. She is learning that life is performance. That identity is brand. That worth is measured in hearts and comments and shares. She is learning to curate before she has learned to simply be.
The algorithms are the invisible curators. They decide what we see and when we see it. They have studied us. They know exactly which images trigger our envy, which posts make us feel inadequate, which content keeps us scrolling past midnight. They arrange the exhibition for maximum emotional impact. We think we are browsing freely. We are being guided through a carefully designed maze.
I read somewhere that museums cause something called museum fatigue. Visitors become overwhelmed. Too much beauty, too much information, too many things demanding attention. The mind shuts down. The eyes glaze over. You stop actually seeing anything.
This is how I feel after an hour on social media. Fatigued but unable to stop. Overwhelmed but still scrolling. The museum has no closing time. There is no guard to say, “We are closing now, please exit.” There is only more. Always more. Another room, another gallery, another exhibition of someone’s perfect life.
The cruelest trick is this: we compare our behind-the-scenes to everyone else’s highlight reel. We know our own truth—the unwashed dishes, the crying in the bathroom, the 3 AM anxiety. But we see only their museum pieces. And we think: why is my life so much worse? Why does everyone else have it figured out?
They don’t. Their basements are as full as ours. Their storage rooms overflow with the same mess we hide. But we never see those rooms. The museum shows only what the curator selects.
I have a friend who quit social media entirely. He said it was like leaving a religion. The first few weeks, he felt lost. What was he supposed to do with moments if not document them? How would people know he existed if he wasn’t posting? But slowly, something changed. He started experiencing things without the curatorial voice in his head. He watched sunsets without framing them. He ate meals without photographing them. He felt feelings without composing captions.
“I remembered what life felt like before,” he told me. “Messy. Unfiltered. Undocumented. But real. More real than anything I posted.”
I haven’t quit. I don’t know if I can. The museum has become part of how I understand myself. When something happens to me, my first instinct is still to frame it for display. I evaluate my own experiences by their aesthetic value. I have developed what I can only call curatorial consciousness—a constant background process judging each moment’s shareability.
This is what the museum has done to us. It has inserted itself between experience and feeling. We no longer simply live. We live and simultaneously evaluate the content potential of our living.
Memory itself has been colonized. The apps show us “memories” from years past—but only the beautiful ones. Only the exhibitions. Our personal history becomes a sanitized narrative. The pain gets erased. The struggle gets filtered out. We look back and see a museum of a life that never quite existed.
My grandmother’s memories were different. She remembered everything—the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. Her past was not curated. It was whole. She could tell you about her happiest day and her worst day with equal clarity. Her life story had texture, contradiction, truth.
My memories are becoming smooth. Polished. Museum-ready. I am losing the texture. I am forgetting what was real.
Sometimes late at night, when I cannot sleep, I think about what we are building. This vast collective museum of lies. Billions of people, each maintaining their own gallery, each performing for each other, each believing everyone else’s performance while knowing their own is false. It is a strange kind of loneliness. We are more connected than any generation in history, and more isolated in our hidden truths.
The exit exists. It has always existed. The door is simply closing the app, putting down the phone, walking outside where nothing is documented and no one is watching. Where you can be ugly and honest and real. Where your worth is not measured. Where you exist without being exhibited.
I walked outside yesterday. No phone. Just me and the afternoon and the ordinary street. Nothing happened worth posting. Nothing was beautiful enough to photograph. It was boring by museum standards. But I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time.
I felt like myself. The unfiltered version. The one nobody sees.
It was enough. More than enough.
The museum will still be there when I return. It always is. But for one afternoon, I remembered that I am not an exhibit. I am a person. Messy, unfiltered, undocumented.
And that is infinitely more real than any lie I ever posted.