WE NEED TO KNOW LESS ABOUT EACH OTHER.

For all our talk of connection, I sometimes wonder whether we have confused being seen with being known.

The distinction is easy to miss because technology has collapsed the distance between the private and the public with such breathtaking efficiency that it now feels almost unnatural to keep anything to ourselves.

A disagreement with a spouse becomes a thread before the argument has ended. A medical diagnosis arrives hand in hand with an Instagram carousel. Friendships dissolve in real time before an audience that neither knows the people involved nor possesses enough context to judge them fairly.

We have become chronic narrators of lives we have scarcely had the opportunity to live.

It wasn’t always like this.

We are drowning in a sea of unnecessary revelation. In an era that rightfully celebrates self-expression and individual liberation, we have unwittingly traded away one of humanity’s most vital sanctuaries: privacy. We are talking too much, oversharing more than is needed, and broadcasting the intimate parts of our lives to a crowd of strangers who were never meant to see them.

Freedom was supposed to unburden us, but its unforeseen tax has been the total erasure of healthy shame and with it, the much needed dignity of discretion.

We rightly challenged generations of silence that demanded people hide abuse, mental illness, infertility, addiction and other deeply human experiences behind respectability. That cultural shift was necessary. Countless people found language for their suffering because someone else was brave enough to speak first.

Yet, every correction carries within it the possibility of over-correction, and ours has been to assume that because shame is unhealthy, discretion must also be in turn, unhealthy.

But these two things are not one and the same.

Discretion has little to do with embarrassment and everything to do with discernment. It is not asking, “Can this be said?” but rather What becomes of it once it is?

The answer matters because speech has always possessed an uncanny penchant for irreversibility.

We treat the internet like a fleeting conversation in a crowded room, forgetting that every tap of the publish button leaves an indelible digital footprint. What feels cathartic to share at twenty-five becomes an immovable anchor at thirty-five.

People might forget the thing you said but one day, when it somehow manages to matter again, they will remember.

We are all inadvertently writing a version of an auto biography, one upload at a time.

This is perhaps the question we should ask ourselves more often: What do I actually want the world to know about me, and why do I need them to know it?

Every day, the internet is flooded with confessions, heartbreaks, and internal dilemmas spilled across screen feeds for the high-friction currency of cheap clout. We perform our most vulnerable moments for an audience that is, by design, largely indifferent. It is a harsh truth to confront, but it is necessary to know.

People simply do not care about your life as deeply as the algorithm leads you to believe. To the casual scroller, your rawest trauma or deepest relationship dynamic is merely “gist” at best and a passing trend at worst.

Everyone is already encumbered by their own personal battles and private anxieties. The illusion that a million strangers are holding space for your confession is just that—an illusion.

Most people are not thinking about us nearly as much as we imagine. They encounter our confessions while waiting for a train, lying awake at two in the morning, avoiding work or absent-mindedly scrolling through a lunch break.

Our deepest vulnerabilities occupy the same screen as holiday photographs, recipes and football highlights. By tomorrow, another stranger’s heartbreak will have replaced ours.

Before you offer your private life up for public consumption, test it in more personal spaces first. Say it to yourself. Drop it in your private group chat with the people who actually know your character, your history, and your heart.

Build a sanctuary with a few trusted souls who will hold your burdens with the sanctity that it deserves.

The internet is not a safe space, nor was it ever designed to be one.

There is an important difference between the friend who sits beside you in silence after devastating news and the stranger who leaves a heart emoji beneath your post before moving on to the next one.

The internet has convinced us that these gestures belong to the same emotional universe. They do not.

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Perhaps this explains why public vulnerability can leave people feeling unexpectedly lonely. Exposure creates visibility but visibility is a poor substitute for intimacy. To be deeply known has never required thousands of observers. It requires a handful of people who remember your stories without needing to be reminded of them.

The impulse to tell everyone everything often disguises a far older human longing: to be understood. Yet understanding has always demanded conditions that public platforms cannot reliably provide. It requires patience, context, affection and trust—all qualities cultivated over time and almost impossible to mass-produce.

An audience may validate you, argue with you or applaud you, but it cannot shoulder the obligations that accompany genuine friendship.

Perhaps we have forgotten that intimacy has an economy of its own. It is built on earned access. Information has become so abundant that we rarely stop to ask whether familiarity is the same thing as closeness.

There are people who know your birthday, your political opinions and the chronology of your last relationship yet would struggle to know the core complexity of who you really are. That is a peculiar kind of knowing.

The older I grow, the more convinced I become that a well-kept private life is not evidence of fear but of freedom. It allows certain relationships to exist outside the relentless pressure of performance. It grants mistakes the dignity of remaining temporary. It gives ideas room to mature before they are handed over to the tribunal of public opinion.

Above all, it preserves the possibility that some parts of a life can remain sacred simply because they belong to the people living them.

So before pressing ‘post’, perhaps the most worthwhile question is not whether something is authentic or whether it will resonate, but whether the internet is, in fact, the place where this particular piece of your life ought to reside.

Every story asks something of its listener, and not every listener has earned the right to receive it.

We have spent years insisting that everyone should have a voice. Perhaps the more urgent lesson now is that every voice also deserves a threshold.

I hope with all of this, I have been able to convince and not confuse you to bring back secrets.

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All my love,

Oreva.