Extra Practice · exam-style extract
The quiet tyranny of the curated self
It has become fashionable to lament the performative turn in public life, as though sincerity were a natural state from which we have lately fallen. The historical record offers little comfort to such nostalgia. What has altered is not our appetite for self-presentation but its infrastructure: the polished anecdote once required an audience in a room; it now requires only a connection. Critics who deplore this shift tend to conflate two quite separate complaints — that we perform too much, and that we perform badly. The second is by far the more interesting. A well-made persona is, after all, a form of courtesy, sparing others the raw material of our moods. What grates is the amateurism: the studied spontaneity, the humility so laboriously arranged that it announces its own construction.