Pinned to the Top of Me

Aug 31

In the beginning, our digital selves unfolded in order.

Timeliness mattered.

We titled our Facebook albums things like “Europe Trip 2006” or “First Year at Uni.” Our posts naturally drifted down the page as newer ones took their place. Even Instagram began with an unspoken rule: if you posted a photo, it was understood to have been taken that day, often with the in-app camera. If it wasn’t, you were expected to signal the difference with a “throwback” tag. In those early years, our online selves closely mirrored time as it passed.

That’s changed as platforms introduced the ability to pin, favourite, or highlight. Over time, digital identity has become less about the daily flow of life and more about curation. The industry recognized what we likely already felt: the urge to highlight, to hold onto, to let a photo or phrase stand in as a kind of thesis statement about who we are.

Or perhaps, who we were (and still want to be).

What contributed to this shift where chronology stopped being enough? Part of it, I believe, is the growth of our digital archive. What began as a handful of albums, posts, or tweets grew into dozens, then hundreds, even thousands. It was no longer possible to glance at a profile and see the highlights. The posts we believed mattered most, or the ones that best represented us.

Pinned posts answered that need. They provided a way to create clarity out of the sprawl.

“If you take nothing else away, take this.”

At the same time, platforms recognized another point of friction: the permanence of digital traces. A post that lost its appeal (or failed to perform), once had to be deleted outright. There was real friction in that decision to erase something. Now, it can be archived, made private and surfaced again later. We gained the flexibility to edit our digital selves without completely destroying the record.

Archiving is more like memory in this way. It hides without eliminating, allowing us to tuck things away, while still knowing they exist. It’s a gentler kind of erasure, like the way we push a memory into the background without forgetting it. Even if we don’t always want to see it every day, we rarely want to lose it completely.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately because, like everyone, I spend most of my days around the same circle of people. But beyond that circle, many of the connections I value, friends I see or speak to less frequently, know me primarily through the version of myself that’s visible online. For me, that’s often the image of an explorer, someone out in the mountains or exploring a new trail to run. It’s a true part of me, but not the whole.

And like any pinned version of us, it contains multitudes.

Mask or reminder? Aspirational or artifact?

A mask, because sometimes the image of the adventurer is easier to display than the more complicated version of myself that spends most of my days tethered to a desk or commuting in my car.
A reminder because it reflects something (I hope) I’m still capable of embodying. Something I don’t want to lose.
An aspiration, because it points to a version of myself that feels right, more aligned, and one I’d like to inhabit more often.
And an artifact, because, by its nature, it’s a snapshot of who I once was. Frozen in time, whether or not I return to it.

The paradox of the pinned self is this: it can be all those things at once. It’s the evidence we want to leave behind, and sometimes the evidence we want to believe about ourselves.

Pinned posts are deliberate. We choose what sits at the top as if to say, “this is what matters.” Profile photos begin with the same intention, but then they linger. They hang around by default, often long after they’ve stopped resembling who we are.

Most of us land on a picture that feels like it captures us at our best. The right light. The right smile. A moment where we thought, yes, that’s me. Sometimes now it isn’t even a photo, but an AI-polished version. Subtle details like beauty marks, smile lines and imperfect teeth smoothed over by an algorithm that thrives on polish and uniformity.

And I’m as guilty as anyone. Holding onto the image that flatters me most, the one that makes me think, yes, that’s still me, even if it’s been years since it really was.

The trouble is those photos linger, even after we’ve changed. At a certain point in life, our twenties, thirties, forties, we start to lock in a sense of “this is what I look like”. And even decades later, when the mirror reflects grey hair or softer edges, that earlier version still feels like the truer one. Psychologists call it subjective age, the tendency to feel younger than we are.

It's worth remembering how new this is. Not long ago, the only time most people needed a single image to encapsulate them was in death. An obituary photo had to stand in for an entire life, with the weight of showing them as they were in later years or preserving them in youth. Today that burden has shifted to the living. Every LinkedIn profile, dating app, and messaging avatar asks us to pick one image to stand in for us. A polished headshot that becomes our default pin.

And it isn’t just photos we pin. We pin versions of ourselves. The story of the mountain we climbed, told, and retold years later as if it happened yesterday. The party we attended in our university days that spilled out of the house and onto the street. The award we won at work, long after we’d left that career behind. That time in life when we felt the most confident, happiest, or most affirmed by others.

They become stories we reach for when we’re asked to explain ourselves. Just like platforms let us fix a post to the top, we learn to fix certain highlights in memory and conversation. Like a proof point to say, this is who I am.

Over time, they can lose their authenticity. They become less about the experience and more about their usefulness. Sometimes they fit. Sometimes they don’t. But they linger all the same.

Which raises the question: what happens when they no longer fit? Do we unpin them and let them recede back into their original spot in our timeline? Do we archive or delete them?

I’ve become more aware of that disconnect in my own life. Since COVID-19, I’ve felt less adventurous, more cautious. Some of that is age, some of it is circumstance, and some of it I honestly haven’t figured out. Yet the photos and stories I return to, the ones of me running trails and exploring, still feel like they say something essential about who I am. They’re not lies, but they’re not the whole story either.

What I’ve started to realize is that my pinned self doesn’t need to keep circling the same images of adventure. It can shift.

There was a time when my profile felt carefully composed. A steady feed of cotton candy sunsets and lens flares in lush forests. Now it’s more of a patchwork. Fragments representing my writing, pieces of projects, and snapshots from life.

Less gallery wall. More workbench.

It’s still exploration, just in a different direction. I’m seeking uncharted spaces through words, design, and ideas rather than trails.

What we pin says something about us, but it’s rarely simple. Some of it is honest, some of it is residue from earlier versions of ourselves, and some of it is armour we wear to face the world.

It’s worth asking which is which. And whether the selves we’ve chosen to keep at the top still speak for us, or if they’ve become something we’ve outgrown.