Today’s Question For Your Uncommon Evolution: What is one area of your life where you want less input from other people?
Too much social media can make it surprisingly difficult to know what you actually think.
You wake up, pick up your phone, and within ten minutes someone has told you how to eat, how to exercise, how to age, how to date, how to heal, how to set boundaries, how to stop setting boundaries in a way that is supposedly toxic, how to optimize your morning, how to stop optimizing your morning, how to build wealth, how to quit your job, how to stay in your job, how to regulate your nervous system, how to know whether your relationship is secure, and why the breakfast you have been eating for the last ten years is apparently destroying your hormones.
It is an absurd amount of input, and because it has become so normal, we don’t always notice how much of it we are taking in or what it is doing to us.
Obviously, other people have always had opinions. Especially in non-white cultures. Families have opinions. Friends have opinions. Communities have expectations. Religion, school, work, and the people around us have always shaped how we understand ourselves and what we believe a good life is supposed to look like.
But most people throughout human history were not carrying thousands of strangers around in their pockets.
We were not receiving a constant stream of commentary from people we had never met about virtually every decision we made, and there was not an algorithm constantly presenting us with new evidence that somebody, somewhere, thinks we are doing our lives incorrectly.
Now there is.
And it sucks.
The difficult part is that a lot of those opinions are not obviously stupid. Some of them are thoughtful, some come from people with real expertise, some are genuinely useful, and some will introduce you to ideas that improve your life in ways you never would have found on your own.
That’s actually what makes the whole thing so destabilizing.
If everything online were nonsense, it would be easy to ignore. Instead, you can listen to five intelligent people make five completely contradictory arguments and somehow feel like they all made sense.
Should you wake up early and protect the first hours of the day, or should you honor your natural rhythm and stop glorifying early rising? Should you push through discomfort because growth requires discipline, or should you listen to your body because forcing yourself is a form of self-abandonment? Should you stay in the relationship because commitment requires working through difficult seasons, or leave because you should never have to convince someone to meet your needs?
There is a beautifully designed carousel, podcast episode, Substack essay, or sixty-second video waiting to defend every possible answer.
And after enough of that, you may stop asking yourself what you think and start asking which explanation sounds most convincing today.
Too Much Social Media Can Make You Less Certain, Not More
We tend to assume that more information will eventually create clarity, which makes sense because sometimes it does. If you are trying to understand a medical issue, compare mortgage rates, or figure out how to fix something in your house, better information can absolutely help you make a better decision.
But personal decisions are not always like that.
Sometimes more information simply gives you more variables to consider, and every new opinion introduces another explanation for what you might be feeling.
Now you are not simply deciding whether you want to take a new job. You are wondering whether your desire to take it is genuine ambition or childhood conditioning, whether staying is scarcity thinking, whether leaving is avoidance, whether your nervous system feels safe, whether the job aligns with your values, whether you are sufficiently challenged, whether you are prioritizing financial security over authenticity, and whether some American woman on TikTok who moved to Portugal and apparently works two hours a week would consider any of this aligned.
At some point, this is not discernment. It’s just too much noise.
And the more noise you consume, the harder it becomes to hear your own reaction before somebody else explains it to you.
That’s what I’m the most worried about with respect to most people consuming too much social media. It’s not just that it wastes time or distracts us. It can slowly interfere with our ability to know what we think before we know what everyone else thinks.
Social Media Has Made Confidence Look a Lot Like Expertise
One of the stranger things about social media is that confidence often looks exactly like expertise.
Someone speaks clearly, confidently, and in a beautifully edited video, and suddenly their opinion feels authoritative. They may be right. They may also simply be extremely good at Instagram or Tik Tok, and those are not the same qualification.
I don’t say that because I think we should reject everything we encounter online. I have learned genuinely valuable things from people I never would have had access to before social media existed, and I think that is one of the best things about the internet.
The problem is that access to information has also created an environment where almost every human experience can be explained, categorized, diagnosed, optimized, or turned into a list of five things you need to stop doing immediately.
Normal uncertainty becomes a problem requiring a framework. A bad day becomes evidence that your career is misaligned. Feeling irritated with your partner becomes a lesson about attachment styles. Not wanting to exercise becomes either a discipline problem or proof that you need to honor your body’s need for rest, depending entirely on which video the algorithm serves you next.
Sometimes you are just tired. Sometimes your partner annoyed you. Sometimes you don’t feel like going to the gym.
Not every feeling needs to become a theory.
Women Were Already Being Told How to Exist
I think too much social media is especially exhausting for women because we were already receiving an enormous amount of instruction about how we should exist before Instagram ever got involved.
There was always a “correct” way to be a woman, although the correct way seems to change approximately every fifteen minutes.
Be ambitious, but make sure you have balance. Be independent, but remain open to receiving. Be attractive, but don’t care too much about your appearance. Age naturally, but also here are twelve things you should start doing immediately if you would prefer your face not to collapse into itself. Have boundaries, but don’t be selfish. Stop people-pleasing, but remember that relationships require compromise.
And women of color often get an additional layer of instruction about what is acceptable, respectable, professional, culturally appropriate, loyal to our families, or representative of our communities.
So when social media adds another endless stream of advice, it’s landing on top of conditioning that was already there. We were already learning how to monitor ourselves, adjust ourselves, and make sure we were doing things correctly.
Now we have an algorithm “helping.”
The Algorithm Doesn’t Know You
This seems obvious, but I think we forget it: the algorithm does not know your marriage, your finances, your childhood, your values, your temperament, your body, your health, your history, your family, your tolerance for risk, or what you are actually willing to sacrifice for the life you say you want.
It knows what keeps your attention (and, let’s be honest, what gives you anxiety). And that’s very, very different.
If you watch three videos about quitting your job, you’ll soon receive an extraordinary amount of evidence that quitting your job is the beginning of freedom. If you watch three videos about financial independence, suddenly leaving a high-paying job without several years of savings will look like the most irresponsible decision a human being could possibly make.
Neither feed is reality. It is a personalized argument.
And because it is personalized, it can begin to feel like consensus. You see the same idea repeated twenty times and start thinking, Well, everyone is saying this.
Everyone is not saying this. The algorithm has simply figured out that you will keep watching it.
That distinction matters.
Advice Usually Leaves Out the Cost
One of the things that bothers me most about online advice is how often it presents the benefit of a decision while barely acknowledging the cost.
Quit the job and reclaim your life. Fine, what happens to your health insurance?
Cut off the toxic person. Maybe that is absolutely necessary. What happens if the toxic person is your mother and you still love her?
Move abroad. Amazing. What happens when you are lonely?
Become an entrepreneur. Great. What happens when nobody buys anything for six months?
Set the boundary. Fine. What happens when somebody you care about responds badly?
We tend to talk about decisions as though there is a correct option that will eliminate discomfort, when usually there is not. Usually, instead, you are choosing which discomfort you are willing to live with.
Someone else can tell you what choice they think you should make, but they don’t have to live inside the consequences. You do.
That’s why the endless consumption of advice can become so destabilizing. It lets us imagine that if we just find the right expert, framework, podcast, or post, we can somehow make a decision without accepting a tradeoff.
But most adult decisions contain tradeoffs. That doesn’t mean you made the wrong one.
You Can Outsource Information, but You Cannot Outsource Judgment
There are absolutely times when you should listen to someone who knows more than you do. I want my doctor to know more about medicine than I do. I want an accountant to understand tax law. I want a trainer to understand exercise physiology.
Expertise matters, yes. But expertise and authority over your life are not the same thing.
An expert can give you better information, but they can’t decide what you value. Someone can explain the financial consequences of leaving your career, but they can’t tell you whether another ten years in that career is worth the money to you. Someone can explain what usually makes a relationship healthier, but they can’t decide whether you want to remain in yours.
Eventually, information ends and judgment begins, and judgment is personal.
That’s uncomfortable because your judgment will not always be correct. You can listen to yourself and still make a bad decision.
But consuming fifty more opinions does not guarantee a good one either. Sometimes it just makes you too overwhelmed to choose.
Too Much Social Media Can Turn Self-Trust Into a Research Project
There is a particular kind of person who is especially vulnerable to this, and I say that with affection because I know the type very well (me)…(and probably, you).
She wants to make good decisions. She is conscientious, thoughtful, and reluctant to act impulsively. She likes understanding things before she commits. She comes from a culture where acting recklessly is akin to a sin and she likes to carefully consider every option.
Those are all good qualities until every decision becomes an investigation.
You read three books before having one conversation. You listen to four podcasts before deciding whether you are actually unhappy. You search Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, Google, and whatever else you can find because surely somebody out there has already lived your exact situation and can tell you what happens next.
Eventually, you have so much information that you can argue every side equally well. You can explain why you should stay and why you should leave, why you should rest and why you should push, why you should save the money and why you should spend it, why you should trust your intuition and why your intuition is probably just a trauma response.
At that point, the problem may not be that you need more information.
You may simply need to make a choice.
You Don’t Need Another Opinion
I have started wondering whether one of the healthiest things we can do is put a little space between having a question and immediately asking the internet to answer it.
Not every question, obviously. Please continue looking up whether the chicken in your refrigerator is still safe to eat.
I mean the larger questions.
Do I actually want this? Am I happy here? What am I willing to give up for the life I say I want? Do I like this person? Do I want children? Do I want to stay in this career? How do I want my days to feel? What matters to me now?
Before opening Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, three podcasts, two books, and twelve browser tabs, maybe we could sit with the question long enough to hear our own answer beginning to form.
It doesn’t have to be the final answer. It just deserves to be the first one.
Yes – we need other people. We need expertise, perspective, community, and sometimes someone willing to tell us that the thing we have convinced ourselves is completely reasonable is, in fact, ridiculous.
The goal is not to stop listening. The goal is to become someone who can hear other people without immediately losing access to herself.
You can gather information, change your mind, and discover that somebody else knows something you did not know. You can let that new information influence your decision without handing over the decision itself.
You should still be somewhere in the conversation.
We were never meant to consume this many opinions, and one of the stranger skills required for living well now may simply be learning when you have heard enough.
I love working with millennial women of color as they reconnect with themselves and build lives that feel authentic, intentional, and fully their own. I also genuinely love connecting with people and hearing their stories. If you want to share what this essay brought up for you, or if you’re a millennial woman of color who would like to work with me, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out through my Contact Page or email me directly at anjali@uncommonevolution.com.
