Living Your Life in Real Life Has Become an Act of Resistance
"Yo Souba, I haven't seen you online in a minute, man. I hope all is well. I know tough times happen. I'm here if you need anything."
I'm reading this message under a large mango tree in Abidjan, surrounded by childhood friends and family. You can smell the Ataya from a few houses away. We're talking about nothing, everything, and laughing about stories we've already told each other at least fifty times.
Okay, let me give y'all some context. I've been mostly off social media for maybe six, seven, eight months now. I creepily watch IG stories from time to time, but I don't post anything about what I'm doing or not doing. And every few weeks, somebody checks on me. Not the regular checks, but the more concerning ones: "Yo bro, haven't seen you online in a minute. Hope everything is good." "You good?" "Been quiet lately."
And I appreciate it. Genuinely. But every time, a small part of me is also confused.
Because... I've been outside. I went back home, spent time with my family, and back in Harlem I abused teenagers on the basketball courts at Morningside Park (still got it) and played football (soccer) every Sunday. Like, I'm living, living, living. I mean, don't get me wrong, everything hasn't been roses. Some things have been exciting, some days I have clarity and feel sure of myself, and some days I have no idea what I'm out here doing. But that's the beauty of it all, ain't it?
So when I got that message sitting under the tree with my friends, I read it twice. Then I put the phone down and laughed. Not at the bro, because his heart was in the right place. I laughed because the assumption people make about my silence isn't that I'm busy, or growing, or resting. It's that I'm suffering. Because in the world we've built, absence from the timeline reads as absence from life. If it wasn't posted, it didn't happen. If you go quiet, something must be wrong.
I'm not saying I'm the happiest man alive. I'm not. Life keeps lifing. But I'm present for it. And I realized how rare that has become: presence without production. Because somewhere along the way, 'I haven't seen you post' turned into 'I hope you're okay.' How did that happen?
Again, I love the check-ins. Please keep checking on your people, and check in on me while you at it. But I think we're using visibility online as some sort of evidence. Evidence that you're happy, that you're successful (“I'm happy to announce”), evidence that you have friends, that your relationship is good, that you travel (I be abusing this). And somewhere along the way, I think I started confusing a life being visible with a life being lived. Those are not the same thing.
I feel like I was so busy proving that I'm alive—“look at what I'm doin—that I started enjoying my actual life less and less.
And as I saw this in myself, I started seeing the pattern everywhere. We stopped living life and occasionally sharing it, and started designing life so it could be shared. The trip gets planned around the photo. The park bench comes with a tripod. I've watched people go live at the park to tell their followers how important it is to be present at the park. We are narrating the moment instead of being in it. And the rest of us? We lie in our beds, in our living rooms, scrolling for hours, watching other people perform a life they curated for us.
Let me be clear about something. This is not an attack on content creators. I am a storyteller. I believe stories are how we understand, escape, and construct reality. Some people are called to document, and they do it with excellence and intention. May Allah bless their craft. I'm not telling you to delete your accounts. I'm not even promising I'll stay off forever. The storyteller in me will return to telling, but I want to return with something true to tell, not a life staged for the telling.
But being away from social media for a while has made me confront a question I don't think I had ever really asked myself: If nobody knows I did it, can it still be enough for me? (Al’hamdulilah for the deen, cause it's the same idea as performing good deeds). The answer is that it should be good enough.
As a storyteller, I love using words to capture moments. But I want to be careful that my storytelling never becomes a substitute for having a story worth living, and that I never care more about the picture of the tree than the shade it's giving me.
So, yeah, if you haven't seen me online in a while, I'm aight. Not every day, and not in some "I figured life out" kind of way. I'm still me: overthinking things, trying to do too much, and mostly, figuring things out as I go. But I've been living, and I'm starting to really love the parts of my life that people will never see.
Maybe living your life in real time has become an act of resistance.
If it has, I hope I can keep on resisting. I hope I keep sitting under the tree. Drinking my tea. Laughing with my people. And every once in a while, when something beautiful happens, letting it happen without needing to show y'all.
