Deer in Headlines

By Gery Deer

Most of us spend our days performing. Not acting in the theatrical sense—no stage lights, no applause—but performing, nonetheless. We perform competence at work, patience in traffic, and happiness on social media. By the time evening rolls around, many of us deliver a full day’s worth of lines with little meaning.

Think about your own morning. You check email while eating breakfast. Are you tasting your coffee, or just swallowing it? That small moment may hold the difference between performing life and actually living it.

Performing is when you do something because the deadline is first thing tomorrow and someone expects a result. Presence is when you do something because you noticed something that refuses to leave you alone—like the barista who always draws a careful leaf in the foam even though almost nobody looks.

For most people, the gap is subtle. It’s the difference between doing the thing and the thing having you. You can move through an entire day answering emails, making small talk, nodding in meetings, checking boxes—and never actually be there.

Presence sneaks up on you differently. It’s the moment you stop mid-sentence because you heard a bird outside and realize you haven’t listened to anything but noise all week. It’s noticing the weight of a conversation instead of rehearsing your reply while the other person is still talking.

Social media has turned performance into a sickening staple. We curate our moods, polish our opinions, crop the messy edges out of real life until what we share is more like the reflection of ourselves in a funhouse mirror. The result is a strange pressure to appear more together, more informed, more inspired than we actually feel.

There is a place for performance. Teachers perform to hold the attention of their students. Leaders perform to steady a room. Writers, speakers, even columnists perform a little to shape chaos into something readable.

But performance was never meant to replace presence. When the show never ends, we start losing small human signals: the pause before someone tells the truth, the tired look behind a joke, the quiet satisfaction of finishing something that mattered.

The cost of such nonstop performance is exhaustion. Not the dramatic burnout people post about online, but the quieter fatigue that comes from always being slightly on stage. You measure your reactions, edit your sentences, and move through the day as if someone might be evaluating you.

Presence, by contrast, is disarmingly simple. It begins with that moment when you realize you’re just running the script. But you can change that. 

Maybe slow down long enough to taste the coffee or look up when someone speaks instead of nodding while staring mindlessly phone. Maybe step outside and notice the weather or the graffiti on the bakery wall.

None of this will make you more impressive, build a personal brand or make a post go viral. What it might do is return you to your own life.

Presence can steady people. It lowers the noise enough to notice what actually needs your attention—a hard conversation, a good idea, a tired friend, a quiet, ordinary moment that would otherwise pass unnoticed.

And strangely, the more present you become, the less life feels like something you have to manage. Problems are still there, deadlines still exist, but being human was never supposed to be a full-time performance.

It was supposed to be lived in small attentive pieces: a conversation where you are fully engaged, a walk where you notice the season changing, a calm moment where your mind is not rehearsing tomorrow.

The challenge is not abandoning performance entirely. Sometimes the job requires it. Sometimes some of your day requires polish and composure.

The real trick is remembering to step off the stage when the moment passes. Look up from the script. Listen for the bird outside the window. Taste the coffee while it is still warm.

Because the goal was never to perform your way through life. The goal is to actually be there while it happens. And if you catch yourself mid-performance today, that pause might be the most honest moment of the day. Stay for it even if nothing else changes.