All the Light Outside the Screen

What We Lose When We Share

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

—Michel de Montaigne

Above: A portrait of a serial poster.

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I.

Somehow, somewhere along the way, the boy began to think a memory wasn’t real until someone else could double-tap it. Electronics supplanted embodiment; a screen now stood between despair and ecstasy.

He forgot that use it or lose it was an inescapable law. What felt like clearing mental RAM was, in truth, the slow demolition of his capacity to remember everything, everywhere, all at once. He posted things that should never be public; “sharing is caring” turned out to be the cruelest lie of all.

Sun-bleached sand, a best friend’s wedding toast, a cold pint of Guinness, his mother’s lopsided birthday cake, each moment waited in a mental departure lounge. Taking up precious space until the proof was posted. Likes served as passport stamps, comments as souvenirs, validating that the trip had happened, that he had really been there, that he existed, that he mattered.

II.

At first it seemed harmless. Everyone was “documenting.” But, over time, the boy noticed a thinning—like a favorite T-shirt that becomes holey and threadbare after one too many washes—between what he lived and what he remembered. The scenes he shared most often began to flatten into their own thumbnails. When he pictured that beach, there was no salt in his nostrils, no sand in his sneakers—only a square photograph with Valencia slapped on top. The moment had been embalmed in pixels; all the life had leaked out

Still, he kept uploading, stuffing a physical hole full of pixels. Each burst of red-heart confetti chased the crushing quiet in his apartment into momentary retreat. A follow-up post, a clever caption—anything to make the glow last just a bit longer.

His phone became a tiny casino: pull-to-refresh, watch the reels spin, maybe hit the dopamine jackpot.

Then the reels began to warp time. Life no longer moved in hours and days, but in content blocks: sunrise B-roll, coffee pour, midday work shot, golden-hour stroll. He arranged real events to fit the storyboard. One night, while plating piping-hot penne alla vodka, he rotated the basil innumerable degrees until it looked better for Stories; the sauce cooled to a tepid lump before he even took a bite.

That’s when the first memory went missing.

III.

Scrolling a year-old post—he and his sister on a rooftop, laughing and stumbling so hard that the horizon seemed to blur—he realized thousands had been let in on a private joke, one he could no longer recall. The joke, the living spark, was gone. He had traded it for applause.

It turns out that attention is a jealous landlord; it charges rent in the form of memory. Each sliver of his private life surrendered to the timeline lost its smells, its temperature, its heartbeat. His moments came back polished and silent, like seashells with the ocean rinsed out.

Late nights, he messaged others: influencers, meme-dealers, micro-blog maestros, and the like. The common thread wasn’t confidence but unshakable restlessness mistaken for purpose. Happiness charades. The more panels added to the highlight reel, the more frantic the staging became. Posting often enough was like writing a personal laugh track because silence had simply become unbearable.

IV.

He tried detoxes: one-week fasts, grayscale mode, phone off at dinner, airplane mode at night.

But when time was up, he sprinted back, hungry to refill the feed and prove that his absence had been productive.

The detox itself turned into content; even attempts at privacy became performance art.

V.

Understanding arrived on a rainy walk home, phone dead, pockets buzzing with phantom notifications. A stranger cried into an umbrella and mascara washed to ink.

Reflex said to capture it, frame the loneliness, write a poignant caption about city life. But a second instinct, nestled quietly in his gut, said: keep walking.

Let the sadness belong to its owner.

Leave the story unharvested.

VI.

Back home he thumbed over the plus icon, then scrolled back to the very first photo he had shared: twenty-one, heavy scruff, gripping a gas-station coffee at dawn after finishing a cross-country drive.

No filter, no followers, just jittery joy at reaching the ocean. He remembered the unpleasant squeak of the cheap styrofoam cup, the sour burn of the Colombian brew, the gull that stole his donut—because no audience had rented that memory.

He closed the app, deleted it, and sat in the hush that followed. It reminded him of leaving a crowded bar and having cigarette smoke cling to his coat. In the silence, his own pulse emerged—slow, irregular, alive. He realized the forfeit wasn’t merely privacy; it was ownership of his life, the right to let moments remain messy and half-formed instead of sanding them down for public display.

VII.

He once thought the unhappiest people were online because they were unhappy.

Now he suspected unhappiness was the tax platforms collected, compound interest on every vulnerable slice of life mindlessly relinquished. Black mirrors reflect fantasies that real mirrors cannot.

One night he sat by a real window, not a glowing one, and cracked a short story collection to a random page. His eyes fell on this quote:

But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.

At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or a woman much older falls silent for a day or two, then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow- lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

He looked up and watched the streetlamp flicker through the hot summer rain.

No one else would see it.

No heart would float across the pane.

The moment would stay right here, breathing in the dark. He refused to cheapen the atoms by turning them into bytes.

And in keeping it, he kept himself.

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Coda

We think sharing is generosity, but sometimes it’s surrender. Every time we press publish, we give away not only data points, but also the raw clay of becoming that demands time in suspense and incomplete.

The journey ceases to be the destination because it must hurry to make the 10AM slot in someone else’s feed. The more we chronicle the living, the less we feel it; the timeline metastasizes across the calendar like cancer in the body.

I’m not advocating for hermitage. Some stories beg to be told aloud, and community can be something like salvation. But there is a difference between invitation and extraction.

A dinner remembered only by those at the table nourishes longer than a hundred-thousand views.

A secret kept can mature like wine; a secret posted spoils in the sun.

As Gandalf once said, “Keep it secret. Keep it safe.”

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Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on Twitter X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom