After returning to the city from the countryside, I quietly deleted these three photos from my WeChat Moments.
On the third day after returning to the city, I sat in my twentieth-floor office, gazing at the gray sky outside the window, and suddenly realized I had completely returned to my old life. The green hills and clear waters of the countryside, the sounds of roosters crowing and dogs barking, seemed like just a fleeting dream. However, when I opened my phone and scrolled through my WeChat Moments, those photos taken in the countryside acted like a mirror, reflecting a certain unease within me. So, late one night, I quietly deleted three of them.
This wasn’t a simple act of cleaning up, but a subtle psychological ritual—I was trying to erase some trace, or rather, redefine my relationship with both worlds.
The first photo: Morning smoke
This photo was taken at my grandmother’s house in the countryside at dawn. In the thin mist, bluish-gray smoke rose from the chimney of the old house, blending into the morning mist over the distant mountains. The caption read: “This is what life should be like.”
The reason I deleted it was simple—it was too “correct.” We, struggling in the city, habitually romanticize rural life, imagining it as a form of salvation. But in reality, behind that wisp of smoke lies the toil of Grandma getting up at four in the morning to light the fire, a monotonous repetition etched in our minds for decades. When I returned to the city, continuing my anxieties about mortgages and promotions, this photo became a silent irony. It reminded me: what you yearn for is merely an illusion you can never truly possess.
More importantly, such sharing inadvertently contributes to a romanticized urban imagination of the countryside, an imagination that often overlooks the real hardships and challenges facing rural communities.
Second Photo: A Group Photo with Left-Behind Children
In the photo, I stand with several children from the village in front of a dilapidated school building, all smiling brightly. I wrote on my WeChat Moments: “Their smiles are the purest gift.”
This photo made me increasingly uneasy. First, it raises privacy concerns—I published their photo without the explicit consent of their parents. Secondly, this “compassionate” display is problematic in itself: I treated these children as a kind of “spectacle,” using their “innocence” to highlight my “goodwill.”
Back in the city, I realized that this brief visit and photoshoot made no real difference to the children’s lives. On the contrary, the photos might have reinforced the narrative of the “city savior.” I deleted it as a reflection on my shallow emotional response at the time.
The third photo: A selfie under the stars
This was taken on my last night in the countryside. The star-studded night sky, free from light pollution, was filled with me. I looked up at the Milky Way, my profile appearing particularly devout in the flash of my phone. The caption read: “I found inner peace here.”
I deleted this photo because it was too “performative.” True tranquility doesn’t need to be proclaimed, doesn’t need to be displayed on social media. When I deliberately staged the photo and carefully crafted the caption, that tranquility was distorted.
More importantly, this display creates a false binary: city = restlessness, countryside = tranquility. But tranquility is an inner state, not determined by geographical location. Many people suffer from insomnia in the countryside, and many find inner peace in the city. This photo simplifies the complex reality.
Deleted these three photos are not a denial of the beauty of the countryside, but rather an examination of my own sharing behavior. In the age of social media, we too easily turn experiences into performances, feelings into captions, and complex realities into simple labels.
After returning to the city from the countryside, I realized: genuine experiences don’t need so many witnesses. Some feelings should ferment slowly in our hearts, rather than being hastily packaged into social currency.
Those deleted photos are like road signs, marking my shift from “showing off life” to “experiencing life.” I no longer need to prove to anyone where I went or what I felt. The countryside sunshine, the smell of the earth, my grandmother’s smile—these are already ingrained in my memory, needing no validation from a nine-grid photo collage.
Perhaps this is growth: learning to distinguish what is worth sharing from what should be treasured; what is a genuine experience from a social performance. What I brought back from the countryside shouldn’t just be photos on my phone, but the ability to see life anew.
I still miss everything about the countryside, but I no longer need social media to confirm the value of that longing. Some beautiful things are enough to exist quietly.