You went out last night. Nobody Instagrammed it. Do you exist?

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” our philosophy professor asked us. With all due respect to my junior year philosophy professor, the relevant question might have less to do with flora and more to do with the grinding, Tweeting fauna grazing about the national geographic.

If a girl passes out drunk in a club and no one is around to Instagram it, did it happen?

Of course it does, your parents might say. It is still a shameful thing, no matter its social media traction. “You embarrassed yourself in front of your peers! It happened!” After all, as the philosopher George Berkeley wrote in his A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, “The objects of sense exist only when they are perceived.”

But what if perception—at least the perception that matters in your age group—is all tied up to social media and the big, bad Web? If you went out with your girls last night, had a perfectly rambunctious girls’ night out last night, and nobody was around to tweet it (“From Borough to Draft with my girls @reginagurl @_kickasschick @wanderectionchick channeling Ke$ha #GirlsNightOut #LastFridayNight”), did it happen?

I’m sure it did. How else do you explain that bruise on your leg? But in this age of O.T.T. oversharing, in Generation Me-Me-Me, when everything needs to be immortalized (for about a minute) on social media to make it official, when validation from our peers is so important we can’t start a meal without asking our friends if it’s worth a “Like,” it seems like anything that’s worth anything needs to be reported. So if no one reported it, if no one told your friends about it, what are the chances it might not even have happened, forgotten with next morning’s Instagram feed?

“I came up in the Messy Generation. The generation of the disaster child,” Nashville star Hayden Panettiere said in a recent interview. It fits pretty well with my theory that the way this generation views privacy was shaped by the 2003-2007 era of Paris Hilton. That’s when we watched the people we grew up with—the Lindsays and Britneys—lose their proverbial panties and fall hard from grace.

Maybe we’re all still stuck on that image in Lindsay Lohan’s Confessions of a Broken Heart video, Lindsay in a human-sized aquarium while crowds come by and watch her have a meltdown. She was trying to give us a peek into her pain then. But maybe what we got from that video was shameless exhibitionism—no topic too sacred, no pain too intense not to be broadcasted. I doubt that was the pivotal moment (Lindsay wishes) but growing in that era of overexposure (quite literally, how many exquisitely waxed celebrity crotches did we see?) was the preview to this. Andy Warhol said we could all be famous for 15 minutes. I don’t think he realized it would only be for posts that get more than 15 likes.

So tell me: If a girl passes out drunk in a club and no one is around to Instagram it, did it happen? Maybe it didn’t. After all, who’s got the Instagram to prove it did?