A moment on vacation

I’ve always hated social media — on principle of maintaining a dividing line between personal experience and a self-referential portrayal of that experience— and generally find it an unnecessary pressure to document life in a world where so much is recorded.

After a recent vacation, I realized I had been photographed over the course of a week after years of a pandemic. A new phase of my adulthood in which my orientation to the outside world became far more insular, and that at times threw me completely out of sync with time, space, and my own image. I downloaded the Instagram app to share the photos but felt conflicted.

I’ve worried since I was young that the pressure to document my life would lead to a more image driven existence for myself — adding a layer to my existing deluded tendency to fantasize and daydream, and to negotiate why life is worth living.

Yet I still wonder whether I hate social media as a means of communicating with the world or whether I struggle with the concept of performing our own existence. Why do humans feel the need to show others that they are living — eating, traveling, spending time with others — as if only when it is seen by other people is the only time it’s real?

When I considered posting photos from my vacation, I realized none of them captured the humor of our conversations or the frustrations of compromise or the warmth of our late night confessions over cheap wine. But what the photos did was record an image of a reality that I either hope not to lose or will someday remind me of who I was, in case that gets lost.

But perhaps it’s exactly the meaning making tendencies that make it harder to enjoy the action of recording anything. Maybe a photo really can just be a photo, and the motivations behind why you’re taking it or sharing it, don’t necessarily matter as much as whatever moves someone to act.

As a Millenial incessantly questioned about my unwillingness to tweet and selfishness in withholding private information, I’ve been slowly trying to untether my rage against the meaninglessness of the mass distribution of unmitigated thought. By which I mean, saying the first thing that comes to mind without thinking about why it matters or how it affects the people around you. And that will always bother me, so long as it results in any form of suffering.

But perhaps it’s also my own aversion to the pointlessness of existence — the essense of life’s greatest joys — that makes me equally angry at the images of my own happiness. It makes me realize that my own happiness is often fleeting, unpredictable, and often elusive. And perhaps that’s exactly the case for capturing the moment.