On a quiet Tuesday night a few friends of mine sat in my room. We listened to music, ate popcorn, pretended to do our homework and caught up on the latest gossip. As my friend Grace sat at my desk, she began to look at the large collage of pictures on the wall beside it. Each individual picture was a frozen piece of time. We had some great memories hanging right in front of us. In her casual way she said “The best pictures on this wall are not posed or edited they are of us dancing and laughing.”
Sometimes there are moments so beautiful, so fun, so absurd, so perfect you want to pause them and remember them forever. If you are a millennial, like myself, you pull out your smartphone and snap a picture. If you are anything like me, it is never just one picture though. It is close to forty pictures with many different friends. They must have the right angles, ‘natural’ poses, and flattering lighting. The picture becomes less about quickly pausing the moment and more about “Doing it for the 'gram” or Snapchat.
We are a society that now documents everything. We do specific activities just for the purpose of putting it on our social media accounts. I think I completely understand why. I think the idea of a picture is romantic to all of us, it is literally magic. You have done the impossible and paused your own special piece of time. No matter what happens in your life after the shutter, that picture cannot be moved. It is forever.
Yet, we have taken pictures to a whole different level. We are so obsessed with appearing to be perfect not only in person, but also in the pictures we put on our social media accounts. We edit out our imperfections out with apps and filters. We validate the success of our night on the amount of ‘Likes’ we get. I am not pointing fingers, I most definitely do it too. As my friend Grace said before the best pictures are the ones that you can truly see the memory living on. The ones where we are messily grouped together making funny faces, grabbing each other for a spur of the moment hug or not even looking. The best nights have still happened even when we do not capture them.
I understand it really comes down to the fact that we are afraid to loose the memory. We are afraid that two to two hundred years from now we will not remember a time we thought was the best. However; if the memory is that good, we won’t. I am challenging you (and myself) to embrace the imperfections of your life, even on Instagram. Let’s go on adventures for the sake of adventures not for an artsy picture. Life does not have a filter. Snap the quick picture and put down your phone. Let’s make love, make art, and make memories. If we happen to capture those moments then that is beautiful but if we are too busy living to do that, then that is beautiful too.
