Sample Essay

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Are We Free or Performing? Social Media and the Search for the Real Self

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In the 21st century, the stage of human life has shifted. Our actions, relationships, and even our moral choices increasingly unfold in digital spaces. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter promise connection, expression, and a sense of self-worth, but they also invite curation, comparison, and conformity. 

 

Using ideas from thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Peter Singer, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, along with insights from contemporary voices in podcasts and videos, I argue that social media invites a performance of the self that can threaten authenticity and moral freedom. However, if approached critically, it can also be a space for ethical action, creativity, and meaningful identity.

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The Curated Self and the Loss of Ambiguity

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Simone de Beauvoir, in "The Ethics of Ambiguity", writes that becoming a self requires making choices in conditions of freedom, but freedom is always at risk of becoming “bad faith” if we adopt identities given to us by others without question. Social media, by design, encourages this bad faith. We present a version of ourselves that we think will be liked, one that is polished, filtered, and optimized for attention. It becomes harder to be ambiguous or evolving when our online selves are fixed into roles such as the activist, the funny one, the intellectual, the victim, the brand, and so on.

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This mirrors what Friedrich Nietzsche criticizes in "Beyond Good and Evil" as “herd morality”: the pressure to conform, to believe what everyone else believes, and to fear standing alone. Social media is not just a mirror, it’s an amplifier of social norms and trends. The “explore page” tells us what is popular, beautiful, or worthy of praise. To resist it requires a kind of courage, to be un-followable, uninterested in the metrics, and grounded in an internal sense of value.

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This resistance is difficult. On platforms where reward is instant (likes, shares, comments), the temptation to perform rather than express is nearly overwhelming. We risk becoming, in Beauvoir’s terms, “serious men”, people who treat socially assigned values (fame, aesthetics, clout) as absolutes, instead of recognizing them as constructs open to change.

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Freedom in the Age of the Feed

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In terms of freedom, Hannah Arendt’s "The Human Condition" offers a useful distinction: she writes that real action, the kind that defines who we are, happens when we appear in the public realm as ourselves, not as roles. In ancient terms, the “polis” was where the self could be revealed through speech and deeds that matter. Social media pretends to be such a space, but it's more spectacle than polis, a realm of appearance, not reality.

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Yet there is potential in these platforms, too. Arendt valued storytelling, and on social media we do tell stories. Activists from marginalized communities have used these tools to bring invisible realities to public consciousness. However, the danger is that even justice becomes aesthetic  something to be consumed, hashtagged, or virtue-signaled. As Peter Singer might argue in "Practical Ethics", the moral worth of a post is not in its appearance, but in its consequences. 

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Singer’s utilitarianism reminds us that being ethical online isn't about how we look, instead it's about how we act and what we enable. If someone posts endlessly about climate change but lives a high-carbon lifestyle and doesn’t vote, their public morality is empty. Online life allows us to project a version of ourselves but does not require us to live up to it.

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Language, Meaning, and the Meme-ified Self

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Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations focuses on how language is shaped by use, not strict definitions. On social media, language evolves rapidly: terms like “gaslighting,” “self-care,” “main character energy,” or “shadow work” take on shared meanings and sometimes lose their original weight. Identity becomes partly linguistic: how we tag, caption, or hashtag ourselves is how we signal who we are.

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This creates community but also confusion. Words are stretched to fit trends. “Authenticity” becomes an aesthetic, and “vulnerability” becomes content. As Wittgenstein might note, the meaning of these words is in how we use them but when use becomes too broad or performative, meaning collapses. 

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Despite this, the same tools can be used creatively. In the YouTube video “Social Media and the Self” by Philosophy Tube, the narrator dramatizes how online identities are shaped like performances in a play but also shows how they can be interrogated. Platforms are not inherently shallow; the depth comes from how we engage with them. As Kwame Anthony Appiah suggests in Cosmopolitanism, we live in many overlapping identities cultural, moral, digital. Our job is to make those identities reflect shared human dignity.

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Becoming Ourselves

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To be oneself in a world of performances can be difficult. Social media is here to stay and, in some ways, it can be liberating. We can discover new ideas, connect with others across borders, and express ourselves in creative ways. However, it can also lock us into roles we didn’t choose and distract us from action that really matters.

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As Beauvoir argues, freedom, is not doing whatever we want, it’s committing ourselves to projects that reveal our humanity. In the digital realm, that might mean resisting trends, questioning the values we reproduce, and speaking truth even when it isn’t rewarded. It might mean logging off  or using the platform to make others think more deeply.

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The good life is not about being liked. It’s about being honest, useful, courageous and other similar virtues. The more we accept this, the less the algorithm controls us and the more human we become.