Since its inception, social media has greedily subsumed our media consumption habits, our concept of the internet, and as Kathryn Jezer-Morton argues, our perceptions of our lives.
The Story of Your Life traverses the various facets of life that have become fodder for posting, including chapters on celebration, struggles, home, and grievance. Jezer-Morton weaves in her own experiences as a child who grew up on a commune in rural Massachusetts, as a parent, and as a writer whose career and social media presence are fused together, to discuss the ways that social media narratives have seeped into our brains. She sits down with strangers and they go deep and wide on their social media histories, admitting that they’re digitally removing their babies’ acne or that their social justice posting arc was fueled by familial strife.
The internet used to be a place you visited via sitting down at the family computer but has transformed into a constant parallel reality inextricably intertwined with our physical one. The stories we tell about ourselves, our communities, and our lives have always been shaped by culture and media, and Jezer-Morton takes interest in the hegemony of ill-fitting narratives on social media—the ones that please the algorithm but fail to leave space for our humanity and fallibility.
Jezer-Morton’s sharpest analysis occurs when she economically contextualizes our social media behaviors. Even those unfamiliar with Baudrillard can sense the uncanniness of a place intended to be the backdrop of an Instagram post or an event that will look significantly better recorded and clipped down to ten seconds with a 9:16 aspect ratio. The inoffensive, mass appeal popular trends gain steam here, whether it’s the neon sign with a cute catchphrase or the colorful dessert that photographs way better than it tastes, examples of the small-c conservatism of conformity and reproducibility that social media encourages.
When the world becomes made for content rather than content being made for the world, the effect is “grindingly hyperreal,” as Jezer-Morton puts it. Real life bending to the demands, aesthetics, and format of social media is a physical externalization of the same pressures our narratives are facing. Jezer-Morton observes that, “attending big weddings can feel a bit like attending trade shows for local participants in the gig economy,” a jarring example of the economic pressures of personal branding.
She hones in on the very American preference for redemption narratives and stories where people have hustled their way out of whatever hardships befell them and are now perched a safe distance away, ready to recount their tales of overcoming. It’s essential to be grateful, humbled, and healed. This is turbocharged online, but has been our brainworm of choice for much longer, as seen in the hero’s journey, “battling” cancer narratives, and self-help books.
Some claims that Jezer-Morton puts forth intrigue but are mentioned so briefly it’s difficult to feel convinced, like her idea that people film concerts not to watch the video, but because we now frame our reverence and manage our emotions through the literal and metaphorical lens of our phones. She cites a variety of scholars and writers in her work alongside original reporting consisting of conversations with strangers or acquaintances. Though it’s an interesting tack, these stories often remain in the realm of anecdotal and could be bolstered by more stories, or other forms of evidence and reasoning. There is a distinctly millennial bent to Jezer-Morton’s examination of social media, most evident in her praise of Gen Z’s predilection for photo dumps and “vibes,” juxtaposed against the high-effort curation of moments that many of her interviewees discuss.
The story of most peoples’ lives is not compelling to anyone besides the people who know, love, and care about them. Yet in a world where even white collar workers are starting to face economic precarity and being encouraged to post and build their personal brands, being compelling on social media has evolved into a soft skill that might be listed alongside communication and emotional intelligence. The fastest ways to social media success often require a bit of truth-stretching, ragebaiting, and theatricality. These have always been skills, but not skills that our politicians, our hairstylists, and our public library employees all felt like they needed to cultivate. Nowadays, “people who don’t understand how to exaggerate with credibility or how to create charismatic spectacles of themselves struggle to succeed in a culture that runs on emotions.” What are we implicitly encouraging and elevating in people when overconfidence and facades are so heavily rewarded?
Much of the conversation about social media has honed in on screen time and social comparison-spurred anxieties, but Jezer-Morton encourages readers to recognize what it is about social media and sharing our lives that reeled us in to begin with. We treat social media like “sites of divination” and we have become accustomed to some extent with the “affective slurry” of the non-chronological, algorithmically-driven feed.
Perhaps our dissatisfaction with the social media experience is less driven by the doomscrolling and comparisons, and more by the real doom encroaching and the suffocating rigidity of narratives that do not serve us. The uncomplicated joy we presume and project on other peoples’ posts is fundamentally unreplicable in our own lives, which we have to live every single second of. Many may relate to Jezer-Morton’s wondering whether she’s been “cursed with an unslakable thirst for a feeling of transcendent pleasure that simply doesn’t exist in real life.” It can be tiring to be shadowboxing with an impossible opponent.
The paucity of narratives on social media available to us won’t be solved by additional representation. The platforms remain run by gigantic tech companies that make money by selling our attention and our data, and now by feeding everything into LLMs as well. The pressure to present a coherent, categorizable self has serious marketing segmentation benefits.
Jezer-Morton is putting forth another accusation and set of consequences for the reader to consider. As they currently exist, “these apps are compliance generators, providing us with the narrative tools to turn out life stories into tales of resilience and triumph, even as our material circumstances keep worsening.” It’s hard to write a book about social media these days, not just because people are more likely to be on social media than reading a book, but because a staple of social media discourse is the state of social media itself. Jezer-Morton does a good job of not retreading predictable ground and her more measured read on the values and drawbacks of social media is reassuring. She is a staunch defender of the merit of storytelling while remaining clear-eyed about the fact that we’ve still yet to find a viable replacement storytelling mechanism.
NONFICTION
The Story of Your Life
By Kathryn Jezer-Morton
Viking
Published August 4, 2026
