The curse of performing
What is performing? Performing is when you showcase an ability or some part of your life, which leads people to expect more of that from you. It ties you into a social contract. You demonstrate a skill, a practice, an endeavor, or a hobby, and you give people a chance to react—whether they hate it or love it. This creates a loop. The reaction from the outside world starts consciously and subconsciously reconfiguring your behavior because humans are biologically hardwired to seek approval, validation, and acceptance.
Your behavior starts to skew in a direction where more people will accept or acknowledge your efforts. It is a combination of two things: you want more people to see your hobby, and you want a greater percentage of the people who see it to approve of it. If someone disapproves, even if it is just a fraction of the total audience, you wouldn’t want that. Negativity sticks in our brains, and we are hardwired to avoid negative responses.
Let’s go through an example. Someone starts hiking and they post a picture on a social media feed. People react to it with lots of love, appreciating the new healthy journey, calling them inspiring. The next week, the person does it again and gets the same kind of feedback. They do it again and again. Two things will happen here. First, people will start to see that the person is not doing anything novel. If it becomes repetitive, the likes and the acknowledgment from people drop off because there is nothing interesting happening. So, you are pushed to do more novel stuff. But if your success metric is the number of people acknowledging your hobby, it is hard to stick to an effort that will only produce outstanding results in the very long term.
Secondly, even if people don’t like your posts, when you meet them in person, they will just talk about the part of your life that you exposed to them. They will ask you, “Why did you stop hiking? What hikes have you done recently?” In that case, you are forced to either maintain the image of someone who is a great hiker with upcoming plans, or you have to present a story for why you stopped. In all these cases, your behavior starts getting bound by other people. You opened the door for such a loop, and this is counterproductive.
Sharing your life is important in today’s day and age. There are next-level success stories of comedians who built a great career by constantly sharing their journey online. But you need incredibly thick skin for that. It is not for the average person; it is for the very best in the field. It takes time and effort to hone a craft and build an audience while having fun. Having fun is the most important part because otherwise, it just becomes performative. You start doing it for the sake of feeding the loop you created, rather than just because you enjoy it.
As long as you are having fun and doing things that are fun to you—irrespective of whether someone likes it or not—it is a very liberating journey towards whatever end goal you have chosen, and it does not bring in unnecessary social gymnastics.
Think of a private company going public. Once they go public, they have to produce quarterly reports, and the public judges them. Yes, they can raise a lot of capital, but it’s a double-edged sword. They are accountable to the public. They have to make sure the market does not have negative sentiments, and they have to make sure every word they put out is of the right size and shape. They cannot move as fast as before. “Move fast and break things” applies to a private startup, but a public IPO company must move slower to prevent a catastrophic failure.
Being performative is similar to that. Opening the door for people to judge you slows you down. You have to start overthinking your actions in a way that you hadn’t before, and your velocity reduces.
Getting validation is fun, and overall, it is not inherently a bad move because you can end up finding like-minded people who will help you grow. It can open doors for you in rooms you were never even present in, and set chairs for you where you never even expected. But everything has two sides. While it opens you up to good possibilities, it also opens you up to performative behaviors targeted strictly at pleasing the audience you have developed. That can become restricting, and it is hard to free yourself of it because your audience can immediately switch to other similar content that they prefer.
All is not lost. It is still helpful if you can put yourself out there without falling into the performative loop. But if the loop sets in and you start to tailor your content just so more people like it, you lose the original fun aspect for which the audience started seeing your content in the first place. That is very counterproductive.
Fun might be the most important metric of the journey, after all.