Performance Leaves Us Hungry

May 25

7 min read

Updated: Sep 17

The loneliest I have ever been, I was also the most visible.

I was posting, sharing, building something. Or maybe trying to. A career from a story, a platform from a belief system, a community from an algorithm. I was shouting into the internet about things I genuinely cared about, trying to help people, trying to matter in the way American culture tells you mattering is supposed to look: reach, engagement, followers, impact you can measure on a dashboard. And I was desperately, profoundly alone.

That was not a coincidence. It was a feature of the system.

Idaho

There is a particular exhaustion that comes not from doing too much but from performing too much. They feel similar from the inside—the depletion, the sense of running on nothing—but they have different sources. Doing too much is a logistics problem. Performing too much is an identity problem. You have spent so long curating the version of yourself that exists for an audience that you begin to lose access to the version that doesn’t.

I was exhausted in Idaho in that second way. Everything I experienced had to be curated for expression, documentation, or usefulness to someone else. Grief became a post. Conviction became a campaign. Even joy had to be paused while some part of me figured out how to frame it. I was not really living my life anymore; I was producing it.

At the same time, I had very few reliable connections. I had Carter, but I had no meaningful community. I tried to build one through potlucks, gatherings, and the ordinary infrastructure of neighborhood life, but people were unavailable. Not because they were unkind, but because that muscle had atrophied. American friendliness is real and warm and entirely compatible with not showing up, and I didn’t understand that yet. I only knew I was exhausted and alone, performing for an audience that could see me but could not hold me.

The Performance and Its Blindness

The rest of the world sees Americans clearly. We do not see ourselves at all.

This is not a comfortable thing to say, and I don’t say it with contempt. Americans are among the warmest, most genuinely friendly people I have encountered anywhere. The openness is real, the enthusiasm is real, and the desire to connect is real. But warmth and genuine community are not the same thing, and America has confused them for so long that most Americans no longer seem to know the difference. We are friendly the way a storefront is welcoming: the warmth is immediate and sincere, but it does not necessarily require anything of either party afterward.

This is how a country can be extraordinarily outwardly warm and profoundly lonely at the same time. I don’t think those things are contradictory; I think they are related. When genuine community erodes, and the structures that create real belonging, obligation, proximity, and mutual witness disappear with it, performance begins to fill the vacuum. Warmth is performed, as are happiness, hardship, conviction, belonging. The feeling becomes secondary to its expression, until eventually the expression begins to stand in for the thing itself.

Social media did not create this dynamic, but it perfected it by giving the performance an audience, metrics, and a feedback loop that genuine community could never compete with. A potluck that nobody comes to leaves you with a table full of food and the knowledge that nobody came. A post about community leaves you with likes.

I was thinking about this recently after a conversation with a friend here in Romania. She told me, earnestly and without irony, that Americans were saving homesteading culture globally. By making it cool on social media, she said, Americans were inspiring the rest of the world to return to land, food, and seasonal rhythms. She meant it entirely as a compliment, but I was stunned by what I was hearing.

A culture that largely severed its connection to land and food production generations ago, through industrialization, suburbanization, and the dismantling of agrarian life, was now being credited with saving that knowledge for cultures that had never lost it. The performance of a thing had become so visible that it was being mistaken for the thing itself. American visibility had become so total, so confident, and so culturally dominant that even its simulations could be received as instruction.

This, I think, is the blindness: not malice or stupidity, but a culture so fluent in its own performance that it has difficulty distinguishing between doing something and being seen doing it, and so accustomed to its own influence that it rarely has reason to imagine the view from outside. I had lived inside that blindness myself. I knew exactly what it felt like, and I know now what it feels like to begin stepping outside it.

Pennsylvania

When we moved to Pennsylvania, I stopped. It wasn’t deliberate or part of some practice or philosophy; I simply stopped feeling the same need to post everything. As I stopped performing, I started paying attention instead. My attention shifted to my neighbors, to the ongoing neighborhood drama about the feral cats that everyone had opinions about and nobody agreed on, to the way the seasons moved through trees I was beginning to know by name. I noticed the creak of my old floors, my books, and the particular quality of being surrounded by things that did not require anything of me except presence.

I probably didn’t take enough pictures, but it was the best chapter of my life because it felt like home. Not performed home, or the aestheticized version with the linen and the sourdough and the ring light, but the real thing: creaky, ordinary, and entirely mine.

For two years, Carter and I lived like that, surrounded by neighbors who showed up and a community that built itself quietly out of ordinary proximity and genuine attention. Nobody was performing it or making it cool because there was no reason to. It simply existed.

Eventually, though, the larger world intruded on the small one we had built. The division in America had been building for years, but it had begun to feel like something more disturbing, something that felt less like disagreement and more like danger. The election confirmed what we had already been feeling. We loved Pennsylvania and did not want to leave it, but we left anyway.

Romania

Romanians can be petty. They can be attached to their image, their reputation, and their standing among neighbors. I am not describing a perfect culture or a simple one, and I am conscious that I am observing it as an outsider. But after living here for more than a year, one difference has become increasingly difficult for me to ignore: I do not sense the same loneliness here.

People enjoy each other’s company regularly and unremarkably, without necessarily organizing it into an event or documenting it for an audience. Community is not something everyone seems to be trying to build, save, or prove; it is simply one of the conditions of ordinary life. I suspect the idea of making it visible to strangers in order to establish that it exists would feel strange to many people here, not because Romanians are more virtuous, but because there is nothing particularly remarkable about having people around you.

Nobody here posts about their chickens because all of their neighbors have chickens, and that observation, as small as it sounds, has come to represent something much larger for me. So many of the things that are ordinary here are the same things Americans are desperately trying to prove to the world they have rediscovered: the homestead, seasonal rhythms, preserved food, the kitchen garden, people gathered around a table. Here those things require little commentary. They are often unworthy of documentation precisely because they are ordinary, and they continue to exist whether anyone is watching or not.

I have been here long enough now to feel the difference in myself. The reticence I developed in Pennsylvania, that quiet decision not to perform my life for an audience, does not feel like deprivation here. It feels like the most natural thing in the world, as though I have simply stopped announcing that I am breathing.

What I Am Still Unraveling

I did not come to Romania to find myself. I came because America was becoming a place we could not stay, because an opportunity opened, and because we took it. What I found here was not some great revelation about who I am, but enough distance to see more clearly where I came from.

I see America’s warmth more clearly from here, and I mean it when I say that warmth is real. I see its violence too, and mean that just as much. More than anything, I see a culture so fluent in the performance of values that it can mistake the performance for the values themselves. I see people posting about their chickens in a country where chickens have become remarkable enough to post about, genuinely believing that making something visible is itself a contribution—that being seen doing something is the same as doing it, and that reach is the same as roots.

There is something tragic in that to me, and I say it with grief rather than contempt. These are my people. This is my context. I am made of the same culture I am describing, so the work of seeing it clearly is also the work of seeing myself: what I absorbed, what I performed, and what I mistook for real. I am still unraveling those things, and I don’t know exactly what I will do with what I have learned. For now, I am watching and learning.

What I do know is that I am not going back to performing my life. Not because I am cured of the impulse, but because I have lived long enough without it now to understand what it costs. The loneliness in Idaho was not incidental; it was the price of being endlessly visible without being deeply known. And I have seen, in Pennsylvania and now in Bran, what I get to have instead: a life ordinary enough to be unworthy of documentation, full enough that it does not need an audience, and real enough that I no longer need to prove that it is happening.

It is enough.

And it is delicious.