I recently attended a show which was 20 minutes of non-stop death-defying stunts. Instead of your usual jumps and tricks on bikes and cars, the artists created an interesting storyline and built the stunts around it. There were wheelies done through cars, a ‘Hot-Wheels’ track in real life, bikes rotating in mid-air and a Mortal Kombat styled fight sequence. It was so engrossing! Yet I was so amused at seeing how so many people were more interested in filming it than actually watching it. Was documenting that moment really more important than living it?

That smartphones have taken over our lives is no new revelation. We now have the luxury of recording and preserving every glib and mundane moment of our lives. Does that mean we have to? I’m no different than the rest. My SD Card has Gigabytes worth of pictures and videos. I’ve carefully documented a plethora of moments – big and small, significant and insignificant, silly and serious, you get the drift right? Yet I rarely, if at all, go back to view them, let alone share them with the world. Even when I’ve shown them to my friends and family, I’ve felt that the actual enjoyment of living it was rarely captured in the video, HD quality be damned. If a picture is worth a thousand words, I’ve produced sagas. So why am I, and you, for the fact, so determined to capture every waking moment of our existence?

My family albums before smartphones took over barely take up a box’s worth of space in our home. Five generations worth of memories, split into sepia and colour, and only a dusty corner behind suitcases to account for its existence. I look at them and realize that by today’s posing standards, they’re a mess. People aren’t even looking at the camera, the poses are not synchronized, the lighting isn’t perfect, the kids are always anxious to run away and play. But they’re genuine. It was a moment that was truly captured, not choreographed. No one cared if the hair wasn’t alright, or the dress had creases or there was another person in the background. You had 20-something pictures in the reel and these additional demands were immaterial. Now imagine if all your family members today print out every picture in their phones (notwithstanding the WhatsApp forwards of smiling children in flowers wishing you a Good Morning), the sheer volume of physical space (and selfies) it’ll run into. How many of those pictures are actually worth printing and preserving?

Slowly but surely, the emphasis in social settings has moved towards documenting an event. Powered by social media and filters that’ll remove every damn wrinkle in your face, people click away close to 1 trillion pictures every day! It’s an epidemic. Everywhere you go, you see hordes of people bending and pouting away to digital transience. Even kids, who you’d expect to be immune from this, are falling prey. I once saw a birthday party where nearly 15 kids were all sitting with their heads buried in their phones, looking up only to smile at another lens. How tragic. When I was their age, 15 kids in one room? Something was bound to break.

I’ve seen my friends attend concerts and livestream and snap and what not every second of it. A picture of the audience is always a bunch of raised arms with their flashlights on. Who is it helping? I am definitely not enjoying it because 1. I am not there, and 2. The video isn’t doing justice to the actual sensation of being there. And this documenting isn’t allowing you to connect with the performance too, because you’re adding a technological barrier between you and the performer. I was listening to a podcast where the WWE wrestler Edge discussed the same. Since people are more interested in clicking him doing a spear than actually watching him and cringing when he hits the ringpost, he has a harder time engaging them too. Also, to beat a rhetorical point to death, if all of you are documenting the same thing, what uniqueness does it lend to your documentation?

The perplexing part is though that in this time of excess and instant connectivity, loneliness rates are the highest. That’s because humans may have created technology to bridge the connection gap but evolution wise, our brains are still wired for physical interaction. There is a reason that a face-to-face conversation with a friend feels better than a rant over text. And this dichotomy can be confusing when you are clicking and liking away posts of near and dear ones and feeling an absence of connection. Hundreds of likes from hundreds of faces cannot do what a single human might be able to do.

We’ve all experienced how social media validation is a vicious cycle which is built to make you crave more. It wants you to click and upload more because it earns due to the same. That doesn’t mean you have to give in to it. If you go through your pictures from a recent outing and are having a hard time remembering what you did or talked about, it may be time to reflect. Let’s face it, 10 years down the lane, it’ll be hard to remember the sanctity of this documented moment if there are hundreds of pictures of you doing the same thing every couple of days.

The next time you’re out and about living your life, feel free to record it as much as you want. Feel free to share it too, but just keep in the back of your mind the thought that the documentation should be an outcome of the occasion and not the purpose. Years down the lane, if people will look back on the time spent with you, they’ll remember your personality, your humour, the fights they may have had with you, how hard you laughed together. No one’s going to look wistfully into the distance and smile and say, “Damn, what bomb selfies he clicked”.