Lily and Social Media: ‘To Be or Not to Be’ 

Lily Jae Green writes light, playful columns about everyday life, blending gentle humour with a touch of freethinking curiosity. These short pieces explore ordinary moments with warmth, scepticism, and a smile.

I belong to an endangered species: humans without social media. Not ‘deactivated’ temporarily. No. None at all. An absence so total that it almost looks like a philosophical act. 

In a world where everyone documents their life as if they were a star—where people post, comment, like, unlike, and sometimes even pre-like—my absence looks like a statistical anomaly. A kind of bug in the great social machine. And yet I sometimes wonder whether I am missing something . . . or whether I have simply escaped a great collective illusion. 

So, as is often the case, I put the question to my AI. The answer comes immediately, without hesitation: 

‘Not being on social media? That’s a massive advantage.’ 

My AI lays out the arguments with a surgeon’s precision: fewer scams, fewer data thefts, no fake profiles, no targeted advertising, no psychological manipulation, no viruses hidden in a private inbox. And above all: time, calm, an intact private life—which, today, is almost a luxury. 

I realise that my absence from social media is not a technological lag, nor an irrational fear, nor a form of passive resistance. It is a freedom. A rare freedom: that of not being observed, analysed, judged, or categorised by algorithms that claim to know me better than I know myself. 

And this freedom has a particular taste: that of not being turned into a product. Because on social media, everyone becomes a product—even those who think they are selling nothing. We sell our attention, our emotions, our angers, our joys, our holiday photos, our political opinions, our doubts, our certainties, our evenings, our mornings, our cats, our plants, our meals, our birthdays, our wounds, our victories. We sell everything, often without knowing it. 

Me, I sell nothing. I live outside the market. Which does not mean that I live outside the world. I read, I observe, I think, I laugh. I talk to people in real life—which, today, is almost an artisanal activity. I do not confuse ‘being informed’ with ‘being bombarded’. I do not confuse ‘being connected’ with ‘being available’, and I do not confuse ‘being visible’ with ‘existing’. 

Social media have their uses, of course. They allow us to find lost friends, discover artists, follow causes, laugh at absurd videos, keep informed, get outraged, and be entertained. But they also have a remarkable capacity to turn any idea into dogma and any emotion into merchandise. 

And above all, they create parallel realities where everyone is right, where no one doubts, where every opinion becomes a fortress. I prefer open ground. The places where one can say ‘I don’t know’, ‘I may be wrong’, ‘explain it to me’. Phrases that have become almost subversive. 

Not being on social media, for me, is not about fleeing the world. It is about fleeing the noise. The noise of certainties, of instant outrage, of recycled controversies, of absolute truths that change every two weeks. 

It is also about fleeing the temptation to narrate oneself constantly. Because narrating one’s life often ends up replacing the act of living it. And I prefer to live. 

And then there is another detail, almost comic: my absence from social media makes my life mysterious—which, today, is almost a superpower. In a world where everyone displays their opinions like advertising hoardings, saying nothing becomes a form of elegance. People assume that I have ‘taken a step back’, that I am ‘protecting myself’. In reality, I am simply doing what humans did for millennia: living without announcing every breath. 

This voluntary invisibility gives me an unexpected advantage: I escape the great lottery of instant judgements, where one is ranked, rated, and assessed before one has even finished one’s coffee. 

So, what would Shakespeare say? Probably something like: ‘To be or not to be online—that is not the question. The question is: who are you when no one is watching?’ 

For me, the answer is simple: I am myself. Without a filter and without an audience. And I would not trade this tranquillity for anything—least of all for a few likes on a photo that everyone will have forgotten the next day.