How to preserve your private life in the age of social media | Bryce Dallas Howard (re-release)
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. In today's ever-increasing digital world, what's even private anymore? Growing up in the public eye, American actress, director, and creator Bryce Dallas Howard experienced the familiar pressure to share her life with the world on social media. In this personal talk, Bryce shares how with her mother's steadfast guidance, she learned to set personal boundaries and savor the beauty of private moments, reminding us that a private life makes a public life worth living.
In 2016... I filmed an episode of Black Mirror called Nosedive. It was about a woman named Lacey who lives in a futuristic world where everyone rates your social interactions. And for anyone who hasn't seen it, little spoiler, I basically have a nervous breakdown trying really hard to get liked. For many, the episode felt a little too familiar. Until recently, only a small fraction of the human population lived their lives publicly. And while we haven't entered the Black Mirror world yet, we've entered a new era. Everyone has access to a global audience. We all live in public. Some more willingly than others. There's pressure to share more of ourselves than we want. We often feel we have no other choice to be relevant, to fit in, to get ahead, to be trusted and liked, accepted and understood.
This new compulsion toward self-exposure is possibly the biggest social experiment in history. We're making life-altering decisions about our personal boundaries with no guidance and no precedent. Fortunately, there is a blueprint. Anyone who's lived in the public eye as an athlete, a politician or an entertainer has navigated a version of this. My dad has been a public figure since he was five years old, as an actor, a child actor, and later as a director. And I've been an actor since my early 20s. In fact, my family has been in the business of entertainment for three generations, contending with how to handle putting ourselves out there for the last 70 years. My mom, Cheryl, never wanted to be in the public eye.
She just happened to love a man who is. My mom met my dad wrong when they were 16, and by that point, she had flown solo in an airplane, joined an all-boys gun club, gotten in tons of fistfights, and helped her single dad raise her younger sisters. This is to say, my mom was a passionate, busy young person who initially ignored the attention of the famous boy in her high school. It was the early 70s, and my dad was known for playing Opie in The Andy Griffith Show, and he'd soon film a pilot for a new show called Happy Days.
What challenges does Bryce Dallas Howard face growing up in the public eye?
Much of this was lost on my mom. The only thing she watched on TV was Star Trek. It's true. After they finally joined forces, after he actually proposed three times and had kids, my mom transformed into a full-on warrior woman, ready to protect. But it wasn't until I was given a movie script at preschool as a way to get it to my dad that my mom realized his visibility was extending to the entire family and that she would need to prepare us for something she herself had never experienced, growing up in the public eye. And this entailed some extreme parenting tactics. First, no coddling, like ever. As a kid, I was terrified of snakes. So my mom got me a pet snake. When I blanked at my first piano recital and ran offstage crying, my mom insisted I stay and support my peers.
Years later, when my son grimaced at a chipmunk carcass our cat had left in the driveway, Cheryl made him clean up the remains. My mom wanted to toughen us up so we'd have more courage and less fear when dealing with uncomfortable situations. So that meant zero coddling. Put your comfort away, she'd preach. Any challenge that arose was an opportunity to find your sea legs.
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