Writing Memoirs in the Age of Social Media

Really, are Personal Narratives Timeless?

Since platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and X have turned self-expression into an instant broadcast of personal moments, what’s the point of writing memoirs, those long, slow narratives of self-evolution? How does the memoir, with all its patience and introspection, still matter amid the endless scroll of trending ordinary lives?

Meticulously crafted memories, emotions, and imaginations offer readers the same chance to connect with the author’s journey. But unlike the curated flashes of social media, the essence of hardship, triumph, love, loss, and everything in between cannot be contained in a 15-second clip. What’s captured in those short videos are constructed impressions, instant and consumable, devoid of the reckonings and revelations of a full, complex lived life.

Why We Reflect on an Authentic Life

Reading a memoir is an act of reflection. It allows honest stories to either resonate with or sharply contrast a reader’s own reality. The raw and unfiltered truths that emerge from its pages create a connection that philosopher Martha Nussbaum calls the narrative imagination, the ability to enter another person’s story, to see and feel the world through their eyes. In this act of empathetic reading, we don’t just observe a life; we inhabit its texture, its contradictions, its slow becoming.

A memoir also carries historical and cultural weight. Personal perspectives on local events and social change open windows to how the past is felt from within. Social media, by contrast, captures moments in real time but often strips them of context or permanence. Its immediacy can be faked; its truths can be filtered. Memoir, however, works through time, through careful structure that turns memory into insight, and recollection into comprehension.

In our age of rapid information and fleeting online presence, the memoir is a slow and lasting countercurrent. While social media scrolls past like snapshots from a fast moving train, the memoir invites us to pause and step into the landscape itself, walk among the stories, feel their air, and let them change us.

If We Ask, Why Even Write a Memoir?

Not everyone will feel the need to write a memoir. We need not force ourselves to turn our lives into pages. But it may be worth asking: if I were to leave a trace of my being, what would it be? What legacy, however small, would I want to remain after the noise of myself has passed?

If we take this question seriously, writing becomes less an act of display and more an act of witness. The point is not perfect recall of grand events, but attention to what might otherwise fade. A memoir can easily become a spectacle of the self, or it can be a quiet record of how thinking, learning, and becoming happened for one ordinary, irreplaceable life.

To write, then, is to honor both the clarity and the uncertainty of living. It is to let memory settle as imagination without forcing it into neat behavior. This reflection toward immortality allows unanswered questions to turn into ellipses, running on into the larger narrative of humanity.

Meanwhile, post-humanity has become the aim of social media, where our stories no longer belong to us but to the algorithms that harvest them. What were once traces of being are now data, crawled and categorized by the spiders of the internet, preserved but devoid of reflection.

“In art we are once again able to do all the things we have forgotten; we are able to be honest, to say what we feel, to be who we are.”

Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

“It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen.”

T. S. Eliot “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915)