The other day, I was looking through my camera roll. Each square teeming with bursts of color — pink, green, blue; smiling faces flush with happiness; rolling landscapes of hills and sunsets. I scrolled through each photo, day by day, realizing that I hadn’t taken any photos on certain days, even for multiple days at a time. Perhaps nothing had happened that day; perhaps I had simply forgotten to take any photos. 

Either way, I felt a small wave of regret wash over me. It was the classic issue of “if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” It was as if there was no physical record of what I had done on that day, then I had done nothing at all. 

As today’s modern society is rapidly increasing, we are forced to adapt to the fast pace of everyday life. The speed at which life seems to be moving causes the days to blend and mush together, like a variety of colors that eventually become colorless slop. There stems our desire to document everything, to capture it all into a little image on our phones — and regret if we don’t. 

I’ve noticed that sometimes at large get-togethers with friends, there tends to be an allotted amount of time devoted just to photo-taking. Time dedicated to getting that perfect shot, that perfect angle and perfect lighting. 

Not to mention the phone etiquette at concerts. Every time I see a recording of a music artist’s performance from their latest concert or tour, I tend to notice a sea of phones — their reflective black bodies covering the entire venue — instead of human faces. I can’t even imagine how the artists themselves feel; while those phones are being held by people, it almost feels as if the artist is performing to a crowd of technology.

I’m not saying that we should stop documenting completely; taking photos when friends come over or when you attend your favorite artist’s concert is completely understandable. That’s half the fun. But I can’t help but wonder, is anyone really present? We end up spending so much time worrying about whether the camera angle looks right, if anyone’s head got cropped out, and if the pimple on our nose is noticeable, that we end up in another world completely. 

We spend so much time trying to document everything that the very thing we’re trying to preserve is drifting away in real time. 

So, I remind you: you don’t need to document everything. A few photos here and there are always encouraged — a reminder to keep for years to come, to look back fondly on. Documentation is part of what makes up our lives, our history, and our existence. But so is the very notion of living itself. We should never spend more time trying to capture the present when we’re already living in it.