We used to have private lives that we occasionally shared. Now, increasingly, we have public lives from which we occasionally withhold information. It is a remarkable reversal, especially when you consider how recently privacy was an ordinary part of being an adult. You could be married for twenty years without your colleagues knowing the details of your relationship. You could experience financial difficulties or go through a painful breakup without feeling that anybody outside your immediate circle needed an explanation. Today, complete strangers can know the most intimate details of our lives, sometimes before the people closest to us do.
Spend a little time on Nigerian social media and the transformation becomes obvious. Someone is explaining why their marriage collapsed. Another person is sharing screenshots of an argument with a friend. There are detailed accounts of family disagreements, revelations about infidelity and personal experiences that would once have been discussed behind closed doors. And because these stories often unfold over several days, we follow them almost like television series, waiting for the next instalment.
What fascinates me is how quickly this has become normal.
Not so long ago, Nigerian society was almost excessively concerned with discretion. We grew up hearing that family matters should remain within the family and that there was dignity in keeping some things to yourself. Much of this was tied to the fear of public judgment. People worried about embarrassing their families, damaging their reputations or becoming the subject of gossip.
That culture certainly had its shortcomings. It encouraged people to conceal difficulties that deserved attention and sometimes protected harmful behaviour under the excuse of keeping family matters private. Women were expected to tolerate unacceptable situations, victims of abuse were discouraged from speaking up, and personal struggles were often treated as sources of shame.
In many ways, social media has helped correct that imbalance.
It has given people a voice, created communities around shared experiences and made conversations about abuse, mental health and financial hardship more accessible. In Nigeria, where getting institutions to respond to legitimate complaints can be frustrating, public exposure has also become a practical tool for demanding accountability. A complaint that goes unanswered for weeks can suddenly receive attention once it starts trending.
But somewhere within this welcome culture of openness, something else has happened. We have gradually started treating disclosure itself as a form of authenticity, as though the more someone reveals, the more genuine they must be.
Why should the depth of someone’s honesty be measured by how much of their personal life they are willing to make public? There is something strange about a culture that celebrates boundaries in relationships while simultaneously expecting almost unlimited access to people’s private experiences.
Social media has also changed the rewards associated with sharing. A deeply personal story can attract enormous attention, sympathetic comments, new followers and sometimes commercial opportunities. The more emotional or controversial the revelation, the more likely it is to travel. Platforms thrive on engagement, and very little generates engagement quite like the intimate details of another person’s life.
This does not mean everyone who shares a painful experience is looking for attention. But it does mean we operate in an environment where personal exposure is constantly encouraged and rewarded.
Perhaps that explains why even ordinary life events increasingly seem to require public documentation. Relationships are announced, celebrated, analysed and occasionally dissolved before an audience. Pregnancy journeys, hospital visits and moments of grief are shared in extraordinary detail. None of these choices is inherently wrong. What has changed is the assumption that an experience somehow becomes more significant when other people witness it.
And we, the audience, are hardly innocent.
We complain about people revealing too much, yet eagerly read their stories. We examine screenshots, discuss relationship scandals in WhatsApp groups and follow developments involving people we have never met. Sometimes we become so invested that we feel entitled to explanations. A celebrity stops posting their spouse, and speculation begins. Someone announces a separation without providing details, and followers immediately demand to know what happened.
We have become accustomed to access, and access has gradually begun to feel like entitlement.
There is also the question of people who never agreed to become part of these public narratives. A person may be comfortable discussing their marriage, but their spouse may not be. A parent may enjoy documenting family life, but their children may eventually resent having their childhood permanently available online.
The internet also has a habit of preserving moments that people themselves have outgrown. An emotional confession made at twenty-five can resurface at forty. A disagreement that has long been resolved can remain available for strangers to revisit. We have become remarkably comfortable making permanent records of temporary emotions.
What I find particularly interesting is that all this openness has not necessarily made us more intimate with one another. We may know someone’s relationship history, financial difficulties and family disagreements without knowing anything meaningful about their character. Information, after all, is not the same thing as intimacy.
None of this suggests that we should return to the days when silence was automatically considered respectable. Speaking up can be courageous, necessary and transformative. But privacy can be equally valuable. The two ideas should be able to coexist without one being treated as evidence against the other.
Perhaps what we are losing is not privacy itself, but our appreciation of it. The understanding that some experiences are no less meaningful because they remain undocumented, and that having a story does not create an obligation to tell it.
I rather like the idea that there should still be things about people that you can only discover by actually getting to know them.
After all, if we’ve already read your entire life story on Instagram, what exactly are we supposed to discuss over dinner?
