Two years ago, I went a month without taking a single photo. It was at the height of Instagram’s rise in my social circle and like most of my friends, I couldn’t experiencing anything remotely cool without snapping an image of it to post on one of the many platforms we use to show off our lives online.

But I’d begun to sense that life had become less about the experiences themselves and more about others’ perceptions of those experiences — a brunch was as good as the number of likes on our mimosas pic, a hike was worthwhile if we could prove it with great shots of the fog. I wanted to test whether I could enjoy beautiful moments without needing others to know I was having them.

So for 30 days I closed my camera app completely.

My Instagram account went silent, you could hear crickets in my Facebook timeline. For a week I perused and commented on others’ photos with envy and FOMO and thought, “I have no life, I don’t do anything beautiful or fun anymore like all these other people are doing right now.”

I realized then with horror that I’d begun mistaking the online version of my life for the real thing. In the online version, events have only truly happened if they are documented there; they are nonexistent otherwise. No wonder we take so many pictures, I realized—we want to convince the world, and by extension ourselves, that our lives are beautiful.

Dead set on detoxing from this phenomenon, I removed Instagram and Facebook from my phone. I reached out to my friends more in person to see what they were up to and got over feeling like a wallflower in the online world by throwing myself into, well, real life. And by the third week, I was living beautifully and loving my freedom from photos.

Meanwhile, everyone around me was taking pictures. All the time. At every vista people posed for selfies, at concerts they watched the show through their iPhone video screens. It was something I hadn’t noticed until then because, before my 30-day photo cleanse, I’d been one of those people.

In Alex Garland’s 1996 travel story The Beach, his main character says:

“I don’t travel with a camera. My holiday becomes the snapshots, and anything I forget to record is lost.”

These days, it seems there is nothing we forget to record— more photos were taken in the past year than in all the history of photography combined, and in them we have catalogued our lives.

But something is being lost, surely.

Perhaps it’s not the things we are failing to record. Maybe it’s the things we are actually recording — those very moments we have deemed most beautiful. They elude us because we are fumbling in our pocket for the phone, tapping out a password or opening the app, centering the moment in our camera lens. And while we are picking filters or cropping and tagging, the sun has set, the band has exited the stage, the moment has passed. We recorded it, and in doing so missed it entirely.

At the end of my 30 day challenge, I didn’t go back to these apps eager to contribute again. In fact, I lost count and went 34 days before realizing I could snap away again freely like everyone around me. The truth is, I just didn’t feel like it anymore.

I still don’t.

I found I remembered things from those 30 photo-free days more vividly because I had been engaged in doing them rather than documenting them — playful moments on the beach with my sisters over Thanksgiving weekend or sunsets enjoyed from Treasure Island, my phone zipped deep in the bottom of my backpack. Because there was no app or timeline recalling those important moments for me, I had invested something of myself in remembering them. And they are richer memories as a result.