I am tired of living life through the 5x3 screen in the palm of my hand.
I'm tired of feeling this incessant need to open up SnapChat anytime anything remotely interesting is happening in my life.
I'm tired of having to pose every two seconds for pictures while I'm trying to take in the views.
I'm tired of needing to paint this unrealistic picture of what my life is like because we all know that for every smiling picture and 10-second video I post on social media, I've spent about 3 hours crying and 6 hours studying in the library.
Why do our lives revolve around our phones and our cameras? Why is that everything needs to be done so that you can plan out taking pictures to share everywhere? Why is it that every event, every night out, everything I plan to do, needs to have built-in time to take pictures? Not fun candids, but posed, planned choreographed pictures, perfectly timed and positioned so that you look good, even if it's artificial.
I don't want to pose for superficial pictures that are going to be posted on a few sites and then get lost in the mess of the same generic photos that are posted every weekend.
The cute GNO post, where you all got dressed up and are hugging each other while the one other friend takes your picture. The game day post, where you're decked out in your school wear with friends. The kissing your boyfriend or girlfriend, look how in love I am, post. The I'm visiting this cool place and am standing in front of it with an awkward smile on my face post. The look at my bougie food post.
I'm guilty of many of those, I won't lie. But I definitely am not proud of it.
Don't get me wrong though, pictures are so important to have, especially with how easy they are to take nowadays. They capture memories and keep track of the things that you may have forgotten about. But, the best kinds of pictures, the most interesting that people will actually enjoy seeing, are not the posed pictures where you tried really hard to be "cute." They are your candids. The pictures where you're caught off guard, the ones where you're actually doing something interesting, the ones where you're smiling like a doofus. Dare to be different.
Make memories. Actually make memories. Put down your phone and look at where you are, spend real TIME with the people you are with, learn about the monuments and places you're taking pictures of.
There's this thing that we Indians do, called making Patel value. It's derivative and kind of racist, but we make the joke, so it's fine. Basically, it's the idea that any time you go somewhere that's bougie or whatever, you have to take a picture in front of it so that everyone can see where you went. You don't have to actually know anything about the place, you don't have to spend time looking at it, you just have to take a picture with it so that you can prove to all your friends that you went somewhere bougie.
Yeah, it's exactly as superficial as it sounds. And I'm tired of that. Why can't we just make memories instead of making pictures? We spend more time at the places we're visiting with our backs turned, smiling at plastic rectangles, than we do actually looking at those places.
Stop spending your life looking at the world through your screen. Spend it looking through your eyes and making real memories. Don't confuse likes and views with real experiences.
