Writing
Sept 2, 2026This was written from the context of currently living in the United States. I’m talking about things I’ve been noticing in American culture, not making a universal statement about every American or every culture.
I’ve been thinking about how social media has changed our understanding of access, friendship, and even the understanding of whether something can be sacred.
We live in a culture where our homes, travels, relationships, opinions, and experiences can all become content—a simulacrum of reality, as Jean Baudrillard would say. Our Instagram account is not us but an image or replica of us but not reality.
For example, I personally post about maybe 0.05% of my life.
But I wonder if, in the midst of all this “connectedness,” we have lost some of the sacredness of everyday life.
If someone has an iPhone and chooses to share something publicly, we can begin to assume that we have access—not only to the image or information they shared, but somehow to the person, their spaces, their relationships, and the rest of their life.
Social media has blurred the line between familiarity and intimacy, visibility and access, knowing 1% about someone vaguely and actually knowing them.
And I wonder if we’ve lost some of our ability to value the things that remain sacred precisely because they are not fully accessible—and because they require work, effort, discomfort, growth, or showing up again and again.
Not only locations, but spheres of our lives.
Places that remain personal.
Relationships that aren’t documented.
Conversations that aren’t shared.
Communities that have their own histories and contexts.
Friendships where trust is built slowly, over years.
There are people very close to me whom I’ve never posted on Instagram. Not because they are unimportant to me, but because my online presence is curated mainly around surfing and doesn’t represent the entirety of my life.
I know there is a long conversation around “gatekeeping,” particularly when it comes to places and knowledge and communities. And I believe there are certainly forms of exclusion that deserve to be questioned.
But I also think we have to be careful not to confuse privacy with gatekeeping.
Not everything needs to be photographed, posted, explained, mapped, reviewed, or made accessible.
Some things become more meaningful because they are not shared.
And just because we do post a small part of our lives online, doesn’t mean we need to explain the rest.
There is something beautiful about leaving parts of life undiscovered—about allowing people to find things through their own winding journey and their own journey through relationship building (to people, to places) rather than having every place, experience, relationship, and piece of knowledge handed to them through a screen and on demand.
We live in a world where we want everything on demand.
We are increasingly accustomed to convenience and immediacy. We want things to be easy because we are always in a rush. We want information immediately. We want answers immediately. We want access immediately.
And we also want attention and affirmation, which I think ultimately comes back to something very human: wanting to belong and feel accepted.
I think globalization has changed things I think because everything is shared and everything overlaps and there’s becoming increasingly no boundaries.
Globalization has increased connection, but connection doesn’t necessarily eliminate the need for boundaries. In fact, the more interconnected everything becomes, the more we may need to consciously understand which boundaries are meaningful and why.
We now have access to more people, places, cultures, and information than ever before. We can see into lives and communities that were once separated from us by geography, and participate in conversations happening thousands of miles away. But visibility and access are not necessarily the same thing. Just because something is visible to us does not mean it belongs to us, or that we are entitled to participate in every part of it.
Perhaps this is one of the tensions of living in such an interconnected world: learning how to remain open to one another without assuming that everything should be universally accessible. A boundary does not always have to mean exclusion. Sometimes a boundary protects context, history, relationship, privacy, or meaning. Sometimes it simply asks us to approach something with enough humility to recognize that we are entering a space that existed before us and will continue after us.
In this way, boundaries can actually make deeper connection possible. They ask us to consider not only whether we can access something, but whether we have a relationship to it, whether our presence is welcome, and what responsibility comes with participating.
I think we’ve also started to confuse being open with being completely accessible.
Being open to someone doesn’t mean being responsible for giving them access to every part of your life.
Sharing one part of ourselves publicly doesn’t mean we owe everyone access to our friendships, communities, homes, time, or personal relationships.
We live in a culture where so much is expected to be available on demand. If someone knows a little about us, follows us online, or has met us once, there can be an assumption that they should be able to access more—that we should make introductions, provide connections, explain our lives, or bring them into spaces that took years to build relationships within.
But openness and accessibility are not the same thing.
We can welcome people without being responsible for integrating them into every part of our lives.
I also wonder if some of this comes from the way relationships can almost become commodified.
In American culture, I sometimes feel like we start to see people through what they can offer us—what they know, who they know, where they live, what they can help us with, what opportunities they might have, or what access they might give us.
People can almost become objects or resources rather than people.
I’ve gotten messages from so many people asking me for things without checking in about how I’m doing.
And I think that says something about the way we can approach relationships now. Sometimes the relationship itself becomes secondary to what we might be able to get from it.
Maybe this is another way that on-demand culture has entered our relationships. We want information, introductions, opportunities, connections, recommendations, access—and we want them immediately.
But a relationship is not a transaction.
There is something different about knowing someone as a person rather than knowing them for what they might be able to give you.
There is a difference between being connected to someone and actually having a relationship with them.
And maybe that is part of why I value relationships that develop slowly. When you have spent time with someone, shown up for each other, helped each other, listened to each other, and gotten to know each other without constantly asking what you can get from the relationship, something deeper can develop.
But I’ve learned in life that the things I invest in over a longer period of time—and the things I earn over time—end up being much more valuable, meaningful and impactful to me than the things I want immediately.
Maybe there is something important about having to work for things.
About taking the long way.
About building trust.
About showing up again and again.
About letting relationships become close naturally rather than assuming closeness simply because you have met someone or know a little bit about them online.
Maybe the question isn’t how we eliminate boundaries in an increasingly connected world, but how we learn to recognize and respect them.
Bottom line:
Privacy isn’t secrecy.
Privacy isn’t gatekeeping.
Privacy isn’t being unauthentic.
Keeping something personal doesn’t mean believing that other people are unworthy of access. It means recognizing that not every part of life is for every person, every purpose, or every relationship.
Not being completely accessible is not selfish.
Not being best friends with everyone is not selfish.
We can be connected without being constantly available.
We can have community without making every part of ourselves available to everyone.
We can be generous without giving away everything.
And perhaps we can recover some sense of the sacred by remembering that a life does not have to be completely visible to be meaningful.
Some parts of life are sacred precisely because we choose to protect them.