Leading the Witness

Social Media's Tree-Forest Problem induces a spiral of egocentric overthink

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Swap "tree" for "opinion," "experience," or "achievement" and you have social media's central neurosis. We've outsourced the proof of our own existence to an audience.

The spiral is predictable: Posture A could be interpreted as B, what would C think, and how should that affect D—ad nauseam. It doesn't start from vanity. It starts from a universal and under-appreciated truth: we all have a baseline attention need. Look at me at least a little bit. Acknowledging that doesn't make us hubristic; it makes us human. The problem isn't the need—the problem is the vendor we've hired to fill it.

Kranzberg's 1st Law cuts through the usual debate: Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral. Social media didn't invent ego. It handed ego a megaphone, an audience of strangers, and a dopamine loop calibrated by engineers whose incentive is your attention, not your flourishing. The evidence on adolescents is damning, but this isn't only a teenage problem. René Girard would recognize it immediately: we don't know what to want, so we watch what others want, and then we perform wanting it back at them. Social media is a mimetic accelerant. The spiral isn't self-generated—it's contagious.

• Chris Hayes’ Sirens’ Call is a great read/listen on why ‘data as the new oil’ is understandable and wrong. Instead attention is the new oil.

So what's the antidote? Not abstinence. Not a detox. Something harder.

Service short-circuits the ego

The ego doesn't disappear through discipline; it gets redirected. Serving an end greater than yourself doesn't kill the need to be seen—it relocates the witness. Instead of asking what does the crowd think? you start asking did I hold up my end? That's a question answerable only by people who were actually there.

This is why, for me, ghostwriting is more fulfilling than publishing under my own name—even though it shouldn't be, by the logic of social media's ledger. Public praise for my own byline glances off. But intimate respect, the kind born from collective hardship? That lands. It shows up in the ineffable: a look that says thank you for being a resolute constant when things got hard. You can't manufacture that with a post. You can't even fully describe it. You earn it, or you don't.

The ego still hustles in these settings. It's just working for more than the self. That's a sustainable arrangement. What isn't sustainable is asking anonymous public adoration to fill a need that only earned, intimate recognition can meet. Social media offers the sugar high. We keep reaching for it because the real thing requires friction—and friction, as we've established, is not the platform's business model.

There is a trap on the other side, though. Service taken to an extreme outsources judgment. You become a vessel—executing the mission, following the chain, doing the job—until the job is the answer to every moral question. This is how politicians learn to blame administrations and not soldiers, and how soldiers learn to let them. Some institutional distance is structurally necessary; no civ-mil relationship functions without it. But "I was just doing my job" is a more corrosive phrase in America than most places—a country wealthy enough to offer genuine choice, whose military is staffed entirely by volunteers.

I hold that claim carefully. The spectrum of choice is real: the kid from rural Mississippi who enlists because the military is the most viable exit from poverty is not making the same free choice as the legacy West Point cadet angling for trajectory on her resume. The former isn't free from criticism — treating them as beyond accountability infantilizes. But to hold the two equally culpable is to pretend that the weight on each side of the teeter-totter is the same. It isn't. That's not a moral position. That's just bad physics. Circumstances constrain or expand choice. They don't eliminate it.

So what? The antidote to social media's counterfeit recognition isn't selfless service—it's accountable service. The kind where you can't hide behind the algorithm, the mission, or your zip code. You chose the witness. You chose the work. Own both. That's harder than scrolling, and harder than just following orders. It's also the only version that actually builds the tree.

"The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day." - DFW

"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." - Simon Weil

"First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do." - Epictetus