WHAT IS THE POINT
OF CONTENT WITHOUT SOUL?
When did it become normal to turn every thought, every experience and every meaningful moment into something shareable?
Not searching for images. Searching for feeling.
The thought crossed my mind a few days ago when I caught myself sitting in the middle of a beautiful moment and, almost automatically, wondering how it could become a post.
Not consciously.
Not strategically.
Just automatically.
And that's what unsettled me.
It wasn't because I wanted to exploit the moment.
And it certainly wasn't because I was thinking about marketing.
The thought simply arrived on its own.
What stayed with me afterward wasn't the thought itself, but how natural it felt.
Almost as if a small part of my brain had quietly learned that every experience should eventually become something visible.
A photograph.
A story.
A post.
Content.
And that's where the question stayed with me.
When did creating quietly turn into producing?
The strange thing is that I don't have anything against social media. Quite the opposite. Some of the most meaningful opportunities, conversations and connections in my life would probably never have happened without it.
And yet, I find myself wondering more and more what this constant pressure to remain visible is doing to us.
Especially to people who create.
Because at some point, something seems to shift.
A moment is no longer just a moment.
Part of the mind immediately starts asking:
Would this make a good post?
Should I share this?
Would people engage with it?
Is this content?
And somewhere in that process, something subtle begins to disappear.
At least that's how it sometimes feels to me.
Maybe because some of the experiences that meant the most to me over the last year had absolutely nothing to do with visibility.
No photograph.
No audience.
No carefully crafted caption.
Just conversations that lasted longer than expected.
Unexpected connections.
Moments that would have been completely meaningless to an algorithm, yet somehow felt more valuable than anything I could have posted about afterward.
There are moments that become richer when they are shared.
A photograph can inspire someone.
A story can create connection.
A thought can make another person feel less alone.
I've experienced all of that myself.
But I've also noticed that some moments seem to lose something the second I start thinking about how they could be presented to others.
As if they become smaller.
As if part of their value quietly shifts from being experienced to being displayed.
I don't know if that makes sense.
But lately I've been thinking a lot about the word content itself.
The more I hear it, the stranger it feels.
A photograph.
A conversation.
A memory.
A journal entry.
A piece of music.
A meaningful encounter.
Somehow they all end up under the same label.
Content.
And maybe that's what feels so odd.
Because not everything comes from the same place.
Some things emerge from curiosity.
Some from emotion.
Some from a genuine need to express something.
And some exist only because there is a quiet pressure to remain visible.
The longer I work creatively, the more I notice how different those motivations feel.
Especially afterward.
The work that stays with me is almost never the work that was created to satisfy an algorithm.
It's usually the work that emerged from a feeling, a question, a fascination or an experience I couldn't quite stop thinking about.
The strange thing is that we now live in a world where creating content has never been easier.
AI can generate text.
AI can generate images.
AI can generate ideas.
Entire feeds can be produced faster than ever before.
And yet, despite all this abundance, I find myself craving something increasingly simple.
A thought that feels real.
A conversation that isn't optimized.
A photograph that carries emotion.
A person who isn't performing.
Maybe that's also why my relationship with photography has changed over the last years.
I used to think mostly about the image itself.
Today, I find myself caring much more about what happened around it.
The conversation before the photograph.
The silence afterward.
The connection that may or may not happen between two people who barely knew each other an hour earlier.
Because when I look back at the things that truly stayed with me, it was rarely the image alone.
It was the feeling attached to it.
The moment.
The encounter.
The humanity of it.
Maybe that's why I struggle with creating purely for the sake of creating.
Not because I'm against content.
But because I keep wondering what remains when the content is gone.
What stays after the scroll.
What stays after the likes.
What stays after visibility moves on to the next thing.
I don't have an answer.
But I keep coming back to the question.
a question I keep coming back to:
If a moment only becomes valuable once it is shared, was it ever truly valuable in the first place?
Images and Text © Sascha van der Werf
