I watched my son blow out his birthday candles through the screen of my phone, capturing the moment while missing it entirely, creating a digital memory while failing to form an actual one. By the time I stopped recording, the moment had passed, preserved in pixels but absent from my present-tense experience.
I had become an archivist of my own life, more committed to documenting experiences than having them, more focused on proving I was somewhere than being there. Every sunset needed photographing, every meal required staging, every milestone demanded multiple angles and instant sharing with people who weren’t there and might not care.
The camera had transformed from a tool for preserving memories into a barrier between me and the memories I was supposedly trying to preserve. I was living life as if it were a dress rehearsal for the social media performance that would follow, treating real moments as raw material for digital content.
But here’s the paradox: the more I documented, the less I remembered. The photos triggered recognition rather than recollection, showing me what happened without helping me recall what it felt like. I had become a tourist in my own life, collecting evidence of experiences rather than actually experiencing them.
The compulsion to capture seemed to stem from the fear that undocumented moments somehow didn’t count, that experiences without evidence were experiences wasted. As if the tree falling in the forest of my life made no sound unless someone else could see the video, as if joy unexpressed on social platforms was joy that never happened.
I had confused sharing with caring, documenting with remembering, broadcasting with connecting. The instant I reached for my phone to capture a beautiful moment, I stepped outside that moment, becoming observer rather than participant, documentarian rather than experiencer.
The irony was crushing: in trying to make moments last forever through documentation, I was preventing myself from fully experiencing them in the first time they occurred. I was trading presence for posterity, immediacy for imagery, being there for proving I was there.
Tonight I want to practice the lost art of living moments without preserving them, of letting experiences exist only in memory and feeling, of trusting that the most meaningful moments don’t need documentation—they need presence.
