social media rant

Maybe it feels like we’re forgetting so much, because we’re remembering so much more. I’ve got pictures of places I’ve walked past, food I’ve eaten, and quotable remarks my friends have made. I’ve got photos of me laughing, crying, smiling. Screenshots of books I want to read, or songs I once lived for, and pictures of people I’ve never even met. I feel this urge to document everything so that I never forget it and in the process I am losing so much more. Can my new hobby simply be just existing? To actually live in the present moment and enjoy that for what it is, rather than to look back and try to remember it for what it may have been.

Maybe the new instagram can be the reels you rewind in your mind as you lay your head down at night. Real memories are raw and unfiltered and maybe easier to forget but worth so much more in every regard.

I don’t think this realization is new to me. In fact I feel as though I’ve been going back and forth living between the two ways people seem to exist today: attached to social media, or independent of it. I’ve found that when you go absent from it, then it becomes a lot harder to connect socially, and I find it hard to find people that are entertaining enough to encourage refraining from the catered distraction your phone provides. Simply put- how do you find people interesting enough to want to experience them instead? It’s not that people are innately uninteresting, but rather the people you are trying to experience have also signed their soul over to their technological device- unwilling to look away or make true, real, raw connection with the less saturated, unfiltered world in front of them. Maybe the problem is that the world is right here waiting to be concurred, demanding to be explored, but your phone will always be held closer, placed within a reachable distance, intertwined between your fingers, convincing you that you need it there too, if you truly want to live life to the fullest.