AI Summary
5 min read“It is humiliating to try to account for our experiences on platforms that are obviously hostile towards their users,” writes Catherine Jesser Morton in her new book The Story of Your Life. On Galaxy Brain, host Charlie Rosel talks with Morton about how social media doesn’t just distract us or polarize us—it fundamentally reshapes the stories we tell about ourselves, narrowing what we think a human life can be.
From communal storytelling to personal branding
Morton grew up on a commune in Vermont, where she learned early that “a lot of what life is is storytelling.” When she joined Facebook in 2007, she felt like a natural: “We narrate ourselves into being, and we get to do it however we want.” But she also sensed something unexamined happening. “I was like, what are we all doing? We don’t even really know what we’re doing.”
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What you'll learn
- 1 How Social Media Makes Our Lives Smaller — Galaxy Brain
- 2 (01:39) **Episode Setup** - Charlie Warzel introduces the central question: how social media changes our understanding of ourselves and humanity
- 3 (04:55) **Guest's Origin Story** - Catherine Jesser Morton explains how growing up on a Vermont commune shaped her understanding of narrative
- 4 (07:48) **Early Social Media as Self-Narration** - Morton recalls what she was trying to do in the Halcyon days of posting
- 5 (09:05) **Why People Won't Talk About Their Feeds** - Morton reveals her anthropological finding that people resist examining their own posting behavior
- 6 (10:39) **The Branded Self** - Morton defines what she believes people are actually doing when they post
- 7 (12:00) **The Algorithm Shift** - Morton identifies the key turning point from experimental fun to branded performance
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
Most people spend more time than you think agonizing over their social-media posts. Kathryn Jezer-Morton wanted to understand their thinking—and when she dug deeper, she learned that redemption and optimization narratives are what the algorithm rewards, and therefore what drive the stories we tell. What does that mean for how we all think about ourselves? Charlie Warzel talks to Jezer-Morton about how “authentic” has become something different from “true,” and how people’s arcs on social media tend to only point upward.
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