Something the millennial and younger generations have been told so many times, that makes us want to sock the person saying it, is that we spend so much time on social media and technology that we are losing our authenticity and face to face interactions. As annoying as it can be to hear over and over again, there are parts of us that know it’s true. The problem is, we have no clue how to change it. Therefore, naturally, we just keep doing what we are doing. It’s hard to pin-point many nights where you looked at someone to talk to them and their face wasn’t buried in their phone, or when you get together with a group of friends and everyone is just sitting in the same room with their heads down, screens shining on their faces while time just passes them by and company is wasted.
We have become so digital that people feel as if it is a requirement to put anything and everything that they do on social media. This oddly makes the majority of life feel digital, while the actual living is merely something to document. In the 2013 film “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” Sean Penn, who plays the famous photographer Sean O’Connell, says “if I like a moment, I mean, me, personally… I don’t like to have the distraction of the camera. I just want to stay in it. Right there… right here.” That quote is precisely why it doesn’t make sense to me how people can constantly be recording what they are doing. For the most part, taking pictures to remember a moment can be more than worthwhile, but constantly recording our lives and thoughts in order to watch it all again later isn’t living in the present, it’s living in the future and misrepresenting the past.
Sometimes, in the morning, whilst scrolling though everyone’s Snapchat stories from the last 24 hours, its easy to make comparisons to your own life, or even wonder why you forgot to share your recent adventures with the world. The best feeling then being the realization that the world may not know how great of a time you had, but all that really matters are the memories you made and the stories you will tell between the people you shared it with. As absolutely cheesy as that sounds, the best nights are the ones where you forget that the world is digital. The nights where company, laughs, and conversation, or lack thereof, are far more important than who will see it in the morning are the ones worth remembering, anyway. Therefore, whoever started saying “if it’s not on Snapchat it didn’t happen,” you are wrong, you may be joking— but you are wrong. It did happen, and it was epic, and those social media/digitally-free moments are the ones worth living for.
-M