The Documentary Trend That Feels Deeply Unsettling: When Your Entire Life Becomes Content

There is a strange new and growing genre quietly taking over television and documentaries, and I find it fascinating and frightening in equal measure.

It’s the rise of what I can only describe as 'self-surveillance storytelling,' where entire documentaries and crime series are now pieced together almost entirely from people filming themselves.

From social media videos, doorbell footage, dash cams, CCTV, police bodycams, ring cameras, selfie videos, livestreams, voice notes, TikToks and Instagram stories, human beings are documenting their own lives at any given moment, right up until the moment everything falls apart.

I noticed it recently while binge watching Netflix, from The Crash through to The Perfect Neighbor, which felt eerie and almost claustrophobic in the way the story practically writes itself because it relies so heavily on police bodycam footage, CCTV and surveillance-style recordings. It reminded me of the saying, "You can’t make this sh*t up,” because quite frankly, this emerging genre is proof that truth really is stranger than fiction.

The main character in The Crash is Mackenzie Shirilla, a teenage girl from suburban Ohio who is ultimately charged over the deaths of her boyfriend and his friend following a fatal high speed crash. What makes the documentary feel like almost a no-brainer in shaping the verdict around her guilt is not simply the crime itself, but the way her own digital footprint builds a psychological portrait in real time. Through endless selfies, videos, posts and online interactions, Mackenzie presents herself as precocious, materialistic, image conscious and deeply performative, with her social media persona becoming almost another character within the story itself. It made me wonder not only whether anyone really knows who the 'real' Mackenzie is, but whether she truly knows herself either.

Without giving too much away, there is something chilling about watching somebody seemingly construct perception, suspicion and even guilt through their own relentless need to document themselves. The documentary almost forces the viewer to question whether social media has blurred the line between authentic identity and performance so dramatically that some people no longer know where one ends and the other begins.

Then there was Should I Marry a Murderer?, another Netflix series stitched together through the digital trails people now constantly leave behind. In this doco, the amount of filming the main character, Dr Caroline Muirhead, a Scottish forensic pathologist, does of herself at any given moment feels so foreign to me that it genuinely made me wonder where the line between normal sharing and constant self-documentation is now drawn.

To be clear, it's not because the footage was necessarily shocking, but because of how increasingly accepted it now seems for people to constantly film themselves through every single moment of their existence.

I’m talking car rides, arguments, intimate moments within personal relationships, minor and major breakdowns, tears to camera, real or performative, and that is part of the challenge now because it is often hard to tell the difference. It has somehow become socially acceptable to publicly share marriage proposals, pregnancy announcements, affairs, fights and even moments of genuine terror, all captured on camera in real time.

It all has started to make me think of that old philosophical question: if a tree falls in the forest, did it really happen unless somebody was standing there with an iPhone and a fully charged battery?

The commonality whilst watching these series was that I found myself thinking less about the crime or storyline itself and more about the psychology underneath it all. When exactly did we start narrating our own lives in real time like reality television characters? Can we blame the Kardashians, or does it trace back even further to Sylvania Waters, Australia’s own groundbreaking reality series that first blurred the line between private life and public entertainment?

Because if you really think about it, this is an extraordinary social shift that has happened in barely over a decade.

Previous generations may have kept diaries, home videos or photo albums, but there was still a clear distinction between private life and public life. Most moments were simply lived, stored away in the memory bank or completely forgotten. It all felt far more real, imperfect and beautifully undocumented.

Now many people seem to experience life through the lens of potential future content.

Psychologists have been increasingly discussing concepts like 'performative living,' where people unconsciously begin curating themselves while events are still unfolding rather than processing them naturally in the moment. We are no longer just experiencing our lives but are constantly at the ready, camera in hand, simultaneously documenting, packaging and observing ourselves as we live them. It is almost as though many people now exist as both participant and audience inside their very own lives.

And perhaps social media accelerated this shift so gradually that we barely noticed it happening. At first, posting holiday photos, birthday dinners and life’s milestones online to a small group of family and friends felt novel. Then, as smartphones improved and social media platforms exploded, the camera suddenly became almost like an extension of the human nervous system itself. I distinctly remember first noticing people photographing their meals and thinking, right there and then, that we were crossing the Rubicon onto a very slippery slope and somehow, ever since, it feels like we have continued sliding further downhill.

Entire generations have now grown up being filmed constantly from birth and the scary thing is that it means younger people no longer see filming themselves as unusual behaviour at all. It feels emotionally normal because it has become not only widely expected, but almost embedded within the way people now seek connection, validation and even belonging.

But I still think many of us, particularly older millennials and Gen X, carry a strange discomfort watching it unfold because we still remember life before this level of self-documentation existed and humanity was not constantly externally performed. We enjoyed the freedom of not overthinking everything we did and felt comfortable simply being ourselves, no matter how messy, imperfect or unfiltered that looked. We had not yet been homogenised into an endless mould of curated sameness and, at the time, we didn't even realise how much freedom there was in that. As the saying goes, you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, and there is something terribly sad in realising future generations may never even experience that freedom in the first place.

And perhaps that is why these documentaries feel so unsettling to me. Because they expose how much surveillance has quietly merged with ordinary life. Not just institutional surveillance through CCTV and bodycams, but voluntary surveillance. We are now willingly documenting ourselves constantly.

The irony is that many people believe this constant recording creates connection and authenticity, yet often it can create emotional distance instead. There is a subtle difference between sharing your life and performing your life.

The camera changes behaviour. It always has, and reality television producers have known this for decades. People begin editing themselves the second they know they are being watched, yet now millions of people voluntarily live inside that psychological state every single day.

There is also something strangely voyeuristic happening culturally. We are consuming real tragedy, conflict and intimacy through the aesthetic language of TikTok, Instagram and reality television. The line between documentary, entertainment and surveillance has become increasingly blurred.

And maybe that is why these shows leave so many people feeling slightly unsettled afterwards.

Because underneath the crime stories and dramatic narratives sits a much bigger question about modern humanity itself.

When did we stop simply living our lives and start constantly recording proof that we existed?

Eckhart Tolle gave us powerful advice about the importance of living in the now, yet now, more than ever, sadly we seem permanently removed and distracted from it, watching our lives unfold through a screen instead of fully inhabiting the moment itself.

As much as I agree with Shakespeare’s famous line, “All the world’s a stage,” I am not entirely sure we are interpreting it correctly in modern life. As entertaining as I find these documentaries, I remain deeply cognisant of the limitations this constant performance brings to the richness of life’s journey and what it may ultimately be costing us as human beings at the level of the soul.