Why We’re Addicted to Documenting Our ‘Lives’
I have yet to read a convincing argument for why so many of us are now so addicted to documenting every minute of our lives. Disclaimer: For the past five years I’ve lived in Germany — if you, like me, live here and are over the age of 22, I’m afraid to say you live in what I would call ‘a highly admirable bubble’. Social dynamics in the United States have changed almost overnight since I’ve left. Everyone is on their phones, all the time, capturing everything, and this is infinitely more the case with younger people who grew up with this and for whom it has become ’the world as is’.
So why do we document so habitually? I think what the camera does is help us bridge ‘the life lived’ with ‘the life imagined’ and ‘the life shared’. The life imagined is a vague but powerful idea formed out a series of images and patterns burrowed in your psyche and brought to you, traditionally in broad strokes by collective storytelling, and now in highly refined and varied strokes by social media. The life shared is the idea that every ‘instagram-worthy’ moment is open as a vehicle for social validation, which a young person is constantly looking for as they seeks to fill the gaps between their still developing self, their life lived, and who they think they ought to be — their life imagined.
By capturing so much of what we’re doing, often without fully living the doing, we transfer our lives back into the native format of this life imagined; the format where we receive all the input, which naturally feels more satisfying to us, as most of us aren’t lucky enough to see what a good life lived actually looks like. It’s hard — a good life for us might be vastly different from a good life for our parents. And besides, how can slow, subtle reality compete with all the flash and pizzaz of video? Most of us are looking to be told how to be rather than discovering it organically through ourselves. That just… takes too long as there is no clear path, particularly if you’re stuck in a place like suburban America with limited exposure. I don’t begrudge anyone — learning what a good life lived looks like is hard to do. I’m still trying to do it.
Last point — I work in the field of Augmented Reality. “What?!” you might say. “This post took a strange turn.” Well, this tech or some variation of it will actually have a big impact on all this — spoken from someone in the trenches, not a navel-gazing academic. I think there’s a lot of good and beauty that will come from it — it has the potential to be beyond magical, a powerful expression of our shared humanity, but I’m also concerned and very curious as to what happens when our media moves off of the screens and into our physical spaces; when the life imagined blends with the life lived, we may lose this distinction entirely. And that is a potentially scary proposition, because reality is indivisible from the self and one of the last things we control.
