Most people who make this point are selling something. A detox, a book, a retreat. Wunmi Mosaku was promoting a film about social media, which should make her the least credible person in the room, and she said the honest thing anyway.
“To me, social media is about illusion,” she said in an interview on October 5.
Then she put herself inside it rather than above it.
“I’m always like, be true to yourself, be true to yourself,” she said. “But I only show one side of myself on social media. I never show that side of it. I just show the sides where I’m at work, where I have hair and makeup done.”
That is the whole thing in four sentences. Not a warning about screen time. Not a claim that she has escaped it. An actor describing the gap between the life and the grid, and admitting she maintains the gap herself, professionally, with a team.
She is also not pretending she is going to stop.
“We all still engage with it because it is now the fabric of our society,” she said. “I’m not gonna be the first.”
The last line is the useful one. It is not resignation, it is accuracy. Nobody is quitting, because the thing is load-bearing now. Work runs through it. So does family, church, the group chat, the side business, the whole apparatus.
What she is offering is smaller than a solution and more usable than one. If the woman whose job includes being photographed says the pictures are one side of a person she is choosing to show, then the comparison a reader makes at eleven at night against somebody’s grid is a comparison against a decision, not a life.
Mosaku stars in The Social Reckoning. She said being on a film about this did not change how she uses it. The admission is the point. She knows exactly what she is doing on there, and she told on herself.
