You're sitting at a coffee shop with your friends. When the waiter brings over everyone's cups, almost everyone takes out their phones and starts snapping photos, trying to capture the perfect angle of their latte art. They're experiencing this moment through phone's camera lens rather than through their own eyes (and mouths).
The cover photo of this article is from a video that one of my professors showed our class in relation to a lesson about happiness. It depicts how phones have started ruining moments for us.
Some people take photographs to keep memories in their pockets, ready for them to recall on a whim just by opening the camera roll on their phone. However, we've become a society fixated on social media, and often times, we take pictures for the sole purpose of impressing our followers, gaining likes or making it seem like we're more adventurous than we really are. We often want to make people believe that our lives are fun and unique, which they are, but we are doing this in an inauthentic way.
That's why I've stopped caring about my presence on social media.
I can't recall how many times I've been out and about with my friends or family, enjoying the moment, when someone takes out their phone and snaps a photo. They'll spend the next five minutes editing it, the next 10 coming up with a caption and then posting it, consistently checking to see how many likes it is receiving. I'm all about cherishing the moment and capturing it so that we won't forget it as years go by, but we've become obsessed with making our memories noticeable, and that's the problem.
I'm not writing about this as a critic looking from the outside in. I'm writing about this because, like so many others, I'm guilty of worrying about my social media presence more than I should. I've often been inauthentic online; I've spent far too long captioning pictures for my Instagram and even thinking about how to make my Snapchat funny. (Can you imagine trying to force moments just to make yourself look good for a social media platform that's meant to be candid?)
When I could've been spending my time with friends and family enjoying real memories, I spent my time capturing memories out of the sole desire to impress. As I've become conscious of how vain this mindset is, I've started picking up my phone less and looking up more. I've realized how selfish it is to live a moment for yourself when you can be living it with others.
As I've stopped caring about my social media accounts, I've stopped forcing moments. I'm letting the moments happen naturally and then capturing those. That's how we should be using social media. It's not about how we can make our social media accounts appealing, but rather how we can make our lives appealing (and authentic), and then we can share these real experiences with our friends online.
As I've stopped caring about my social media accounts, I've gained a greater sense of self-worth. I am no longer defined by how "artsy" my Instagram looks or how funny my Snapchat story seems. I am defined by the experiences I make, not the way I convey these experiences to others. (And when I do share my experiences, I know that they are authentic and bring me a sense of joy.)
When you put down your phone, you start to engage with the world around you. You start to see the leaves falling from trees as winter nears, not countless notifications from Twitter letting you know that your latest tweet just got retweeted. You start to hear, and I mean really hear, what your friends are saying instead of playing your Snapchat video over and over again to make sure it's just right.
When you start to put down your phone and open your senses, you finally start living. Stop living for the likes and live for the moment, and I promise you will start to make memories that are worthwhile.
