Three reels landed in one feed, in one week.
Before I understood what connected them, I only knew they were describing something close to performative vulnerability, though none of the three used that phrase.
One argued, in Hindi, that Indian society rewards looking successful over being okay. The man drowning quietly inside a Mercedes; the eighty-hour job that costs someone their sleep and health earns more respect than a small job that actually makes them happy. Taali ya neend, it said. Applause or sleep. Choose.
Another was quieter. No thesis, no argument, just a confession, written carefully, about an exhaustion that doesn’t lift no matter how much sleep you get. No anger at anyone specific. Just a wish to be somewhere nobody expects anything.
A third made the same case in English — that an entire generation has quietly redefined success from having more to needing less.
Three pieces of content. One message. One week. That stopped being a coincidence somewhere around the second one.
I want to start with the part that took me longer to see than I’d like to admit, because I think it’s the actual essay, not the throat-clearing before it.
That second reel, the quiet one, the tired one, the one with no thesis, is also, by definition, a performance. It was written with care. It was paced for resonance. It landed the way it landed because someone, consciously or not, built it to land.
Which means the exact thing the first reel was criticizing—dikhawa, performing over being—has slipped quietly into the piece that claims to be about opting out of performing altogether.
Even the exhaustion is getting produced now. Even wanting to disappear has become something you write a caption for.
This is what I mean by performative vulnerability. Not fake feeling The tiredness in that second reel may be completely real. Performative vulnerability is what happens when a real feeling gets shaped, timed, and released for an audience before it’s been allowed to simply exist for the person having it.
I watched a version of this happen in person, at Viram, and I think about it more than almost anything else from that particular cohort.
I’ll call her Ira. On our first call, before she’d arrived, she used almost the exact language from that second reel. Tired in a way sleep doesn’t fix. Not angry at anyone. Just wanting a few days where nobody needed anything from her. It was, word for word, one of the more articulate descriptions of exhaustion I’d heard in years of doing this work.
On day two, we gave her exactly what she’d asked for. An entire afternoon, alone, on the property; no schedule, no expectation, nobody watching.
She lasted about forty minutes.
I watched her leave for the trail with a book she never opened. When she came back, her phone was in her hand, not her book. Not because the exhaustion wasn’t real; I don’t doubt for a second that it was. But because real, unwitnessed rest turned out to be an entirely different experience than the idea of rest she’d been describing so precisely on our call. Without anyone to receive the performance of needing space, needing space stopped having shape. It had nowhere to land. Forty minutes in, she told me later, she’d caught herself composing a sentence in her head, something about the mountains, the silence, and finally breathing, for an audience that, in that moment, did not exist and was not going to see it.
She came back early, quieter than before, and admitted — this is the part I think about — that she’d spent most of the forty minutes deciding how she’d describe the afternoon to people back home, rather than actually having the afternoon. The rest she’d been aching for turned out to require an audience she hadn’t realized she needed until the audience was gone.
She’d asked for solitude and instinctively started narrating it before she’d finished living it.
I don’t think Ira is unusual. I think Ira is what happens to almost anyone who has spent long enough being rewarded for how things look that they’ve lost the muscle for an experience that nobody will ever know about.
The first reel’s argument is really about this same muscle, just applied more broadly, and I’ve watched its exact examples play out for twenty-two years from inside corporate HR.
The gym photo before the gym membership itself. The housewarming party before the house is actually settled into. The anniversary post before the relationship itself has been tended to in the ways that don’t photograph well.
I have sat in more performance reviews than I can count where the person visibly straining under an unsustainable workload said nothing because saying it aloud read as weakness, while the person who’d quietly built a sane, sustainable pace got asked, gently and disapprovingly, whether they were ambitious enough. I have watched people take the eighty-hour job specifically because the exhaustion it produced was legible—nameable, complainable-about at dinner, and worn like a badge—while a genuinely peaceful, smaller life got treated by the same room as a story that needed explaining. Are you okay? People would ask about the person who actually was.
I remember one resignation letter, years ago, from a man who had never once complained in three years on my team. Two lines. Thank you for the opportunity. I’ve decided to spend more time with my daughter before she’s no longer a child who wants me around. No exhaustion story. No dramatic exit. He had simply, quietly, decided, and left. In the same quarter, another employee whose burnout had been the subject of at least four separate conversations, three group emails of concern, and one all-hands mention of “protecting our “people”—stayed for another two years, still complaining, still performing the exhaustion for an audience that had by then stopped really listening. I don’t know, to this day, which of them was actually more tired. I only know which one made it visible and which one simply acted on it without asking anyone to watch.
Dikhawa culture India runs on precisely this confusion. It doesn’t just reward success. It rewards the version of success — and lately, I think, the version of struggle — that comes with a built-in audience already positioned to notice it.
None of this starts in adulthood, and the reel that opened this essay was right to point at where it actually begins.
We are taught marks before we are taught meaning. Trophies before contentment. Perform in front of the relatives, sit up straight for the photo, and don’t let them see you cry at the funeral; smile for the group picture even in the year everything fell apart. Log kya kahenge (what will people say) is not a stray anxiety that shows up occasionally in adult life. For a lot of us, it was installed early enough and repeated often enough that it stopped feeling like a rule and started feeling like conscience.
By the time any of us are old enough to decide, on our own, whether a feeling is worth having privately or worth sharing publicly, the machinery for deciding that has usually already been built by other people, for other reasons, years before we noticed it happening. We were never taught to simply be. We were taught, carefully and repeatedly, to be seen. It is not a surprise, given that training, that even the generation now naming its exhaustion out loud is naming it the way it was taught to name everything else—visibly, articulately, and for an audience that is expected to respond.
What Performative Vulnerability Actually Costs the Person Doing It
Here is the part of all three reels that none of them said, and I think it’s the part that matters most.
The person who is winning this particular game is also losing it. The reel got this right. The man in the Mercedes, the woman with the picture-perfect anniversary post over a marriage that’s quietly dying—they are not exempt from emptiness. If anything, they are further from resolving it, because the applause keeps arriving on schedule, telling them the performance is working, even while the thing underneath it goes on unaddressed.
What none of the three reels named is that the exhaustion post can do the exact same thing. It can become its own small, sad Mercedes—a place to receive real comfort, real comments, and real evidence that you are seen and understood, which quietly makes it a little bit less urgent to change the actual life producing the exhaustion. The relief of being witnessed in your tiredness is real. It is also, if you’re honest, sometimes enough relief to make you stop looking for the harder, quieter, unwitnessed relief that would have actually addressed the tiredness itself.
I don’t say this to make anyone’s exhaustion suspect. Most of it is completely real, including Ira’s, including whoever wrote that second reel. I say it because “real” and “performed” are not opposites. They can be true of the exact same feeling at the exact same time, and learning to tell which parts of your own experience are which might be the most useful, least comfortable thing you ever do for yourself.
So here is the test I’d actually offer, since the reel that started this ended with one too.
Not “are you tired.” Almost everyone reading this is tired. Not even “is it real.” It’s real. That was never the question.
The question is this: would you still want the rest, the quiet, and the disappearing if you were completely certain nobody would ever find out you’d taken them? No caption, no story, no one asking if you’re okay, no comment thread offering you comfort for having said the brave, tired thing out loud. Just you and the actual hours, unwitnessed forever.
If the answer is yes — if the wanting survives completely intact once you remove every single person who might have seen it — then what you have is not performance. It’s the real thing, and it deserves to be protected exactly as fiercely as Ira’s exhaustion deserved protecting, even though she couldn’t yet give it to herself.
If the answer gets quieter, if some of the wanting seems to evaporate the moment nobody would ever know, that’s not a character flaw. It’s just information. It means part of what you’ve been calling rest was actually still a performance of rest, aimed at an audience you didn’t fully realize you were still performing for.
Taali ya neend. The reel that started all this got the choice exactly right. I’d only add, “Check honestly which one you’re actually choosing before you assume the answer.”
Most people never run this test on themselves, not because they’re shallow, but because nobody ever taught them how, and because the answer, when it’s honest, is sometimes uncomfortable enough that it’s easier not to look. Dikhawa culture India doesn’t reward the people who look, only the people who perform having already looked.
This is, plainly, the work I do. Not therapy, not a wellness retreat, not another feed to perform tiredness into. A structured, private space, built specifically as an antidote to performative vulnerability rather than another outlet for it—the kind Ira eventually found on day three, once the performance had nowhere left to go and the actual feeling finally had room to exist—where the only audience for what you’re carrying is you and, briefly, someone whose entire job is to ask the harder version of the question you’ve been asking yourself in captions.
If any part of this essay landed somewhere you didn’t expect it to—if you noticed yourself checking, honestly, which parts of your own tiredness are real and which parts are waiting for someone to notice—the Clarity Call is free, thirty minutes, no pitch, and nobody will ever know you booked it except you. That, it turns out, is usually the entire point.