Ladies and gents, let’s all just take a brief moment to think about how many photos we have posed for during the past weekend, month and — heaven forbid — the past year.
Social media has seriously inflated the number of photos that we take of ourselves and with our friends.
Everyone wants to get all the likes and proof that their lives are, in fact, fabulous from all their friends, family, acquaintances and people they don’t actually know.
Our egos and vanity drive us to take picture after picture, just because we can.
There is so much time that gets devoted to taking the perfect picture, to capture the essence of your chosen outfit for your night out on the town with your boo thangs.
It becomes essential for you to get a quick pick with that friend that you haven’t seen or heard from since freshman year.
Just the other day I was chatting with my best friend Nikki, who is my muse for this particular column, and we were talking about all of the pictures that we have taken in the past and then we came to the shocking realization that we, as best friends, have taken very few pictures together.
As I thought about it some more, I thought about all of my favorite memories with Nikki.
When we spend time together, we are far too busy having fun and living out our latest adventure to stop and worry about capturing the moment with our iPhones.
Instead they just get internalized and I know that I’ll have these memories forever because they are with my best friend.
It seems that instead of wanting to capture the moments with her in order to show off, my relationship with her is meaningful enough that I don’t need to prove it to other people. Or that I didn’t need to show it off to other people.
Maintaining my relationship with her meant more to me than ?capturing selfies with her.
Everyone seems to be caught up in the moment of capturing said moment, and then the moment gets lost because everyone was too busy striking the perfect pose and worrying about whether or not the picture makes it look like you have a ?double chin.
Our egos make us miss out on the moments that matter with our friends.
I am not criticizing the act of taking pictures with friends or even the ?occasional selfie.
But rather, I wonder why we put so much effort into taking a photo with our friends each time we go out on the town, or whenever you go someplace new.
The focus gets put on capturing the photo to share with the social media audience as proof or evidence that your life is so much cooler than ?everyone else’s.
These photos are taken for the wrong reasons. Take photos so you can cherish your memories, and not to gloat.
johnstra@indiana.edu
