Living a hidden life
Embracing obscurity, living coram Deo, and pursuing "true success" with Beth March
“...for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
-George Eliot, Middlemarch
i.
If there is one unconscious, pernicious habit the digital age has given us that deserves to be interrogated, it is the compulsion to document and share nearly everything about our lives.
In Freya India’s searing essay, You don’t need to document everything, she shares a startling example of this. It’s a TikTok video of a young mom in a postpartum hospital room. A newborn child is in her arms. The door opens, and in walks a parade of family members to meet the child for the first time. Nearly all of them have their phones up, simultaneously recording the moment in a video. And the entire interaction is, of course, being recorded by someone else in the room (the dad I presume).
As I watched the video, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of indignation. To be clear, I am not lambasting the people in it. In today’s culture, this kind of behavior is not only normalized, it’s ubiquitous. But I am appalled by the lack of decency and common sense of it all. I couldn’t help but wonder, Why do we think this is acceptable and appropriate behavior? Is nothing sacred?
Over the past two decades, we’ve seen the rise of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Snapchat, and TikTok. Many of these apps were built to be networks of people sharing photos, videos, and messages, seemingly with the promise of connecting us with one another. But as many have documented, these apps do not really make us feel more connected. In fact, they seem to have the opposite effect.1 But beyond their algorithms’ ability to deal us a never-ending stream of content to keep our faces glued to our screens, these apps (along with devices like the iPhone) have slowly trained us to do one thing again and again, almost without thinking: Take as many photos/videos from our lives as possible and share them online.
It is difficult at times to imagine or remember life before all this was the norm. Photography and videography predated the internet, of course. But photos were typically kept in albums, framed on walls, put on refrigerators, or tacked to cork boards (remember those?)—not shared with your entire network. And camcorder videos were kept in a shoe box to pull out once a year and reminisce with family. Compare this to today. Think about how natural it is to post a photo and pithy caption of some happening in your life on social media, as if you were narrating your life to all the world. Or how easily you learned “the way people do social media.”2 This is what it looks like to be a fish swimming in a cultural stream and not know the concept of “being wet”: five people walk into a postpartum hospital room with their cameras rolling. As Freya India observed, “[We] simply cannot conceive of a life that exists without an audience consuming it.”
ii.
I believe our compulsion to document our lives online has a great deal to do with our deep desire to be seen. We long for our lives to be witnessed. To matter to someone. I don’t think this is a bad desire at all—I believe it’s how we were made.
First and foremost, we were created to be seen by the God who made us and loves us. The psalmist called it coram Deo—living before the face of God. Os Guinness calls it “living before an Audience of One.” In a tender moment from the book of Genesis, an angel of the Lord is sent to Hagar, a young woman who has fled into the desert after being treated cruelly by her mistress. The angel says, “Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?” The angel goes on to tell her that she will give birth to a son named Ishmael who will become the father of a nation.
“So [Hagar] called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, ‘You are a God of seeing,’ for she said, ‘Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.’ Therefore the well was called “Beer-lahai-roi.”
The more literal translation for “You are a God of seeing,” is “You are the God who sees me.” And Beer-lahai-roi means means “the well of the Living One who sees me.” Time and time again, the Bible testifies to this profound, soul-shattering truth: The Creator of the Universe sees us, knows us, and loves us. In one sense, to be seen by the Lord is to be loved him. Conversely, to not be seen by him is a kind of hell. “Hide not your face from me, O Lord,” cries the psalmist.
I believe we were also made to be seen and known by others—those dear friends, family, and neighbors living within the bonds of mutual, embodied relationships. But we were not meant to be seen by everyone. Yet this is how we live now—Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. Consider how often most of us post not only about major milestones but also small, trivial matters of daily life. It’s as if we desire not just for the highlights of our lives to be witnessed but the ordinary moments as well. Perhaps it’s because in those small, mundane moments, we often feel an acute sense of ennui. Like eating empty calories on an empty stomach, we fill the unsettling void by sharing the minutiae of our lives with others to elicit a reaction.
iii.
“And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”
(Matthew 6:5–6, emphasis mine)
Though this passage from the Sermon on the Mount deals specifically with prayer, I believe the paradigm within it has something to offer us on this topic. To Jesus, there seems to be something spiritually dangerous about praying in public. I don’t believe for a moment he is saying that it’s wrong to pray in public. I think he’s saying it’s dangerous to turn prayer into performance. The whole thing seems to turn on one’s “why.” If you pray publicly so that you may be seen by others—in other words, so that you may be perceived and praised by others as holy, wise, and important—this is not good. The faint, fleeting claps of others is your only reward.
Fundamentally, prayer is about connecting with God, not posturing for other people. This is why the majority of our prayer should be done in secret. When you pray in secret, you remove the temptation to posture. Sometimes, it is good and right to pray with others or in larger, public settings. But we should not let our prayer become performance. And the more we pray in public—or shall we say, the higher the percentage of our prayers are prayed in public, the higher the temptation to turn them into performance. If a man were to only pray publicly and never in private, what would we discern about the authenticity and the power of his prayer life? What about for a man who prayed primarily in secret and on occasion in public?
Perhaps now you are beginning to see the connection to the topic at hand. Posting online is certainly not the same as prayer. But what if Jesus’s warning about praying in public also applied to living in public? What if we stopped posting online so that we may be seen by others? I’m not saying it’s wrong to post publicly. I’m simply asking us to thoughtfully engage with our hearts and our “why.”
What if more of our lives should be lived “in secret,” as it were? What if we were content to live good, faithful lives, hidden from the eyes of all except the Lord and those closest to us? What if we embraced obscurity as a gift? As a humble reminder to live coram Deo, before an Audience of One?
After all, for most of Jesus’s life, he lived in total obscurity. Nazareth was not a “hot” city brimming with cultural influence and power—it was a backwater. Jesus’s dad did manual labor for a living, and he almost certainly did the same. What did years of living and working faithfully in obscurity do for Jesus’s soul? For his community? For his relationship with his Heavenly Father?
I do not believe for a second that Jesus’s 30+ years of living a hidden life were incidental to his public ministry. I believe they were essential to his formation. Even during the height of his public ministry, Jesus would often “withdraw to desolate places and pray.” Away from the bustling crowds, Jesus could walk amongst the trees and commune with his Heavenly Father. These moments of hiddenness—of silence, solitude, and prayer—seem to be the wellspring of his life and work.
iv.
Another example of this kind of life is depicted beautifully in Terrence Malick’s majestic 2019 film, A Hidden Life. Based on true events, the movie tells the story of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer and a devout Catholic who refused to fight for the Nazis in World War II. The film draws its title from the George Eliot quote at the beginning of this essay.
Franz and his wife Fani are farmers living, working, and raising a family of three girls in a small village in the Austrian Alps. In Malick’s signature style, their daily work and domestic life—harvesting wheat, walking in the fields, caring for their local church, playing games with their children—are presented in a series of moving vignettes. (As a side note, the cinematography in this film is unrivaled.) But through this simple life marked by hard work, genuine love, and true faith, something is cultivated deep within Franz.
When he’s eventually called up to serve in the German army, he refuses to take the oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler that is required of every Austrian soldier. “I have this feeling inside me,” he says, “that I can’t do what I believe is wrong.” Knowing the punishment would be imprisonment and death, nearly every single person in his life tries to convince him to do otherwise. But Franz remains steadfast in his conviction.
At one point, a German officer tries to convince him that his stand is pointless, saying, “What good do you think your defiance is doing anyone? You think it will change the course of things? You think the authorities are aware of you? That your protest will come to their attention? You think anyone will know of it? Ever hear you? No one knows what goes on behind these walls. No one. What purpose does it serve?”
The officer cannot fathom a life lived coram Deo—a life lived in simplicity, integrity, and love. He has not the faith to grasp that a hidden life of faithfulness may yet bear fruit in hidden, mysterious ways.
“If God gives us free will,” Franz says, “we’re responsible for what we do, what we fail to do, aren’t we? If our leaders are not good, if they're evil, what does one do? I want to save my life, but not through lies.”
v.
Perhaps no character in all of literature embodies the neglected virtues of living a hidden life more than Beth March.
In 2020, I read Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s classic tale about Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March growing up in New England in the 1860s. Perhaps it found me, as all good books do, at just the right time. On the verge of turning 30, I was wrestling with some frustration and disappointment at how low I felt on life’s “ladder of success.” Especially as it related to my career, I wanted to feel like a Somebody. I wanted to be seen.
Into this fog of angst walked Beth March. By our culture’s standards, Beth was a nobody. Some might even say a loser. Though she played the piano well, she had no prodigious talent to speak of. Unlike some of her sisters, she had little to no ambition to be great at anything. Being “too shy to enjoy society,” she had few friends outside of her family. She was so sickly she couldn’t even attend school. If Beth had a résumé, it would be utterly unimpressive. No major accomplishments. No awards. No large circle of influence. And yet. And yet. Of all her sisters, Beth possessed the deepest faith, character, love, and virtue.
It is difficult for me to put into words how profoundly moved I was by the character of Beth. Her life is about as far as you can get from “influential-persona-with-a-large-following.” If she lived today, she would not be giving a TED Talk or featured on a 30 under 30 list. No one except her family and a few close friends would even know her name. And yet, I consider Beth’s hidden life of love and faith to be unfathomably beautiful and worthy of sainthood. Perhaps all the more so because of its hiddenness.
Beth possessed a great deal of what the writer David Brooks calls “eulogy virtues,” or the kinds of things people talk about with tears in their eyes at your funeral. These stand in juxtaposition to “résumé virtues,” which is what our culture celebrates today. Brooks said those with eulogy virtues “radiate an inner light,” and so it was with Beth. Though she lived in utter obscurity, everyone who came into contact with her was profoundly impacted. As Beth suffered through a terminal illness, she faced it with an otherworldly sense of courage, openness, and grace.
“Seeing this did more for Jo than the wisest sermons, the saintliest hymns, the most fervent prayers that any voice could utter; for, with eyes made clear by many tears, and a heart softened by the tenderest sorrow, she recognized the beauty of her sister’s life, — uneventful, unambitious, yet full of the genuine virtues which ‘smell sweet, and blossom in the dust,’ the self-forgetfulness that makes the humblest on earth remembered soonest in heaven, the true success which is possible to all.”
Beth’s hidden life of faithfulness and love is, in essence, the Good Life we long for and the “true success” we should be aspiring to. It is a powerful rebuke to our obsession with worldly success and self documentation. And it is a gentle invitation to embrace our hiddenness as a necessity to a kind of virtue—to live before the loving gaze of our Heavenly Father.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading! If you found this essay interesting or encouraging in any way, please show your appreciation with a comment, like, restack, or share. It helps spread the word to more people!
What do you think? How would you describe the effects of documenting your life online? How might living a more “hidden life” lead us to greater love, virtue, and flourishing? Let me know in the comments below!
See Haidt’s The Anxious Generation or Carr’s Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart
I realize not everyone uses social media the same way. But I’m talking about how most folks use it—posting the highlights and everyday happenings from their lives.
That was a soul nourishing read. Thank you
I've had the same thoughts about Beth March and then Matthew Cuthbert in Anne of Green Gables! Coming from a different direction, I honestly do enjoy social media. I like how I have used Instagram, posting like it's a scrapbook and sharing about things I genuinely enjoy and connecting with my friends more in person because of it. I love photography! And I've had a lot of good conversations and built deeper friendships because I've shared my interests and it opens doors for conversations sometimes. But also that can feel a little vulnerable--letting others see you without having a guarantee that it's reciprocated.
I also see how it often can lead to you living for others to see you, not for yourself. I go through phases where I don't want to post anything--but those are also the times I don't want anyone to see me and I want to hide in a safe little hole where no one perceives me. So I also post as an exercise against that, not letting the fear of people seeing me exist or disagreeing with something I say stop me from living or sharing.
I don't think social media at this point (honestly not even excluding Substack...it's how we use it that matters) is designed for people to use it thoughtfully or in a beneficial way but it doesn't mean you cannot. But it can be hard.
When it comes to everyone holding their phone to record meeting a new baby...I see the value of recording that moment. You'll never have that exact moment again and I want to record moments just for myself too. But accepting that one recording is good and setting it aside to capture the moment while you forget it's going can be enough.
I think there seems to be an opposite reaction to the people who record "too much" to not recording at all (not saying that's what you're saying just have been thinking about this!). I have friends who think it's overkill that I always take a photo when we get coffee or go on a walk through a forest. But even if I never post those photos, for me it is the act of recording that helps me pay attention. Looking through my camera's viewfinder and deciding what to focus on helps me to focus. I'm going to document these moments whether I post them or not, and sometimes I want to share and sometimes I don't. And honestly, I don't think not posting is "better" it's just a choice. The shared moments everyone sees are not more valuable either. They're all moments. We only get so many. I hope I'm not wasting any of them trying to impress people with either how responsible and mysterious I am not posting or how cool and busy I am sharing everything.
I just wrote a lot more than I meant to! But I really did enjoy this read :)