It feels like every time I open my phone, a new advert pops up telling me something I must buy. It’s boring, irritating, and unlikely to work – I am a deeply cheap person and will not be purchasing a £50 lip balm, thank you very much. My brain space might be being sold around by Google, but I retain enough strength of will to see when they’re doing it, and generally resist (I was not so lucky when the targeted Wallace and Gromit merch got to me).

But recently, I’ve realised I’m not as immune to commodification as I thought. Apps like BeReal started as a fun way to see what my friends were up to as we went to different universities, but as copycats began to appear almost daily, the incentive to package myself up for other people’s consumption was everywhere. I noticed it most with Airbuds, an app that links to Spotify and lets friends see all the music you listen to. While it’s nice to know when my best friend plays an album we both love, I quickly realised I was self-editing what I listened to when I knew I was being observed. When going to concerts, instead of listening to the music, or even waiting for a song you know, I increasingly see a sea of phones videoing song after song to post later.

“I quickly realised I was self-editing what I listened to when I knew I was being observed”

It’s a symptom of the digital age most adults bore anyone with social media to death about, where “Big Brother” and imagined FBI agents watching your every move. Instead of being part of a conspiracy theory, this invented person watching us has become internal. Birthdays, trips, and formals become excuses to take pictures, moving from a by-product of life to the function of going out. As our lives become increasingly curated online, with ‘aesthetic’ becoming the ultimate compliment, I wonder if any of this can be good for our quality of life. No-one should be able to be neatly packaged as some niche aesthetic named after a fruit or movie, and if they can be, we need to remember that it is a conscious performance.

Packaging yourself into something consumable does social media companies’ jobs for them – as the saying goes, if something is free, then you are the product. It is what Rob Horning calls ‘voluntary self surveillance’. we have made ourselves into minor celebrities in our own lives, dogged by the stress of constant observation. Most people don’t even know all of their followers, and definitely don’t regularly talk to a significant number. This is especially true at Cambridge, where lots of us seem to be constantly networking to find the next Prime Minister, or at least the new Claudia Winkleman. An invisible crowd of observers can’t be good for anyone, and is something we all seem to be internalising.

“As the saying goes, if something is free, then you are the product”

People are inherently messy, unfunny, boring, and ugly – these are fundamental parts of life that even the best people can’t escape. The only way to escape our internal voyeurs is to embrace how cringe having fun is. Seeing perfection constantly also means we start expecting it in ourselves, and other people. It’s unfair to expect the people we know to perform like dancing monkeys for our entertainment, and even more unfair to expect them to be good at it.

Even writing this, I’m aware I sound like a parent trying to get you off your phone. That would be seriously hypocritical as my screen time is genuinely frightening. I expect I will follow none of my own advice. That being said, let me listen to ‘Life is a Highway’ on loop in peace, please.

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