APRIL 9 — I post quite regularly on social media.
Work updates, talks I give, articles I write, books I am reading, people I meet, and the occasional kopi-o moment. Sometimes the posts are polished. Sometimes they are just thoughts captured quickly before they disappear. It has become part of how I process things, and perhaps part of how I stay connected with people.
But if you scroll through my feed, you will notice something missing. You will very rarely find photos of my family. Except for Hari Raya.
Once a year, we take a proper family photo. Coordinated outfits (it’s purple this year, or lilac to my wife!), slightly forced smiles, everyone looking in roughly the same direction. That one makes it online. The rest stay where they are, in our phones, in our conversations, in our everyday moments that do not need an audience.
It is not because I do not love my family. It is precisely because I do.
Over time, I have come to realise that some things grow better when they are not constantly displayed. Not everything meaningful needs to be shared, and not everything valuable needs to be seen. We live in a time where sharing has become second nature. We document what we do, where we go, what we eat, and who we meet. It helps us connect, and in many ways, it helps us remember.
But somewhere along the way, it becomes easy to confuse visibility with value. When everything is shared, moments can begin to feel incomplete until they are documented. Experiences slowly turn into content. Without realising it, we start adjusting how we live, even slightly, based on how things might appear to others. The line between living and presenting becomes thinner than we expect.
I came across a line recently that has stayed with me. It said perhaps the reason your garden is not blooming is because you keep cutting the flowers just to prove that you are a gardener.
It is a simple image, but it captures something quite profound. When we keep extracting moments from our lives to display them, to prove something, to show that things are going well, we may be interrupting the very process that allows those moments to grow fully in the first place.
Some parts of life need time. Some need quiet. Some need to exist without being observed too closely. And this is where restraint becomes less about holding back and more about protecting what matters.
Rumi wrote something along the lines of, “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment; cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition.” I have always read that as a quiet reminder to step away from the urge to explain and display everything. Not every experience needs to be clarified, framed, or presented. Some moments are better left slightly unfinished, held in their own space, allowed to settle before we try to make sense of them.
Not everything needs to be hidden, of course. Sharing has its place. It builds connection and allows us to learn from one another. But there is also value in deciding that certain parts of your life are not meant for public consumption. Not because they are unimportant, but because they are too important.
There is something grounding about having a life that is not fully on display. A conversation that is not summarised. A struggle that is not announced. A joy that is not immediately turned into a post. These moments remain yours, shaped by experience rather than reaction.
In a way, they feel more complete. I have come to see that privacy is not the absence of sharing. It is the presence of boundaries. It is knowing what to keep, and why. When something matters deeply, it does not always need confirmation from outside. Its meaning is already sufficient.
And that is how I see my family. They are not part of my public narrative, not because they are separate from my life, but because they are central to it. Too central to be reduced to occasional updates or carefully framed posts. The memories we build do not need to be validated to be real.
They simply need to be lived.
* Nahrizul Adib Kadri is a professor of biomedical engineering at the Faculty of Engineering, the Director of UM Press, and the Principal of Tuanku Bahiyah Residential College, Universiti Malaya. He may be reached at [email protected]
** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
