#146: The problem with “being present”
Last week, Bug started breathing like an astronaut with a leak in his helmet. Fast, shallow, and panicky. My cat’s been terminally ill for a couple years now, but I’d never seen him this distressed. He kept settling into new spots around the apartment, where he’d gasp for air, as if he might find more oxygen in a different place. I sobbed in fear. I took a video to send to Avi, who was picking up lunch for us a half mile away. Five minutes later, I took another video, and 20 minutes later, in the car on our way to the animal hospital, I took another. Each video resembled the last, but I couldn’t shake the impulse to film him, as if the act might reveal new information. In the back of my mind, I wondered if these would be the last videos I ever took of him. I’m no stranger to anxious record-keeping, but this bout came after a long stretch of newfound detachment from capturing every moment of note in my life. And yet here I was in crisis mode, sharp and present in the way an emergency demands, and the specter of documentation remained.
I’ve been thinking about the role of digital photography in my life, and its potential as a metaphor for the risks of technological progress. The thought first struck me when I realized that, upon learning that I’d lost most of the photos and videos I took between 2010 and 2015, I felt…almost nothing. This didn’t make sense. Based on my historical preoccupation with capturing everything out of some ever-lurking terror that I’d forget my life, I’d expect that news to be devastating. That’s five formative years, ages 21 to 26, gone! And yet it barely registered. This made me wonder: If I’m not compulsively taking photos to remember my life, why am I doing it? Knowing digital photography is a fairly new medium, with its imposing accessibility and glaring lack of limits, what exactly has it wrought?
One answer, for me, is paranoia. It seems likely that my constant documenting isn’t actually about the future, as I claim, but about the present—about quieting the neurotic voice in my head that views experience as a losing game. By “constant documenting,” I don’t even mean anything excessive by modern standards. I’m not staging overly posed pics in public, disrupting social outings to get the shot, or stopping on the sidewalk to aim my phone at any mildly interesting thing. My subjects are ordinary and convenient: My cat napping in a funny position. The weird bruise on my thumb. A tree in bloom. It’s still more photos than I know what to do with. Of course, digital photography can be extremely useful, but I wonder sometimes if it’s worth the cost. Maybe without the ability to capture my life in this way, I’d have accepted that this much of life isn’t meant to be captured.
It’s hard to talk about this without sounding like a luddite, or more annoyingly, an Instagram influencer who acts like they discovered disposable cameras, but film photography seems to live more harmoniously with the human psyche. In 2019, Avi started playing around with a broken-but-functional film camera a friend gave me, and in the years since, he’s shot a roll every two-to-three months. I probably don’t need to tell you these photos feel infinitely more precious than anything on our camera rolls. It’s not just their charming patina or quality of light (impossible to digitally imitate), it’s the fact that they’re limited, imperfect, often candid, with no repeats. I love how they come to us in irregular batches, like little spotty summaries of the previous season. They feel emotionally accurate, too. When I look at them I sense real intention and attention. A desire to celebrate a thing, rather than hammer it into submission. Sometimes I catch Avi scrolling back through them slowly, like a miniature collector admiring his figurines.
When digital cameras became a common household item, it felt like magic to be able to immediately see the photo you’d just taken, and retake it as many times as you wanted. My friends and I took advantage of this after school in our backyards, dressed up in stupid outfits, crowding around the little screen to pick the best ones. In college, digitals slung on our wrists, we learned to exhaustively archive every weekend via Facebook photo album. By graduation, we were filling our personal camera rolls instead. These leaps did away with everything annoying about film: the waiting, the choosing, the not-knowing. In turn, we got new problems: neuroticism, distraction, vanity. There’s something instructive in that transaction; slowness for immediacy, commitment for its opposite. A camera in a pocket with unlimited cloud storage may sparkle with possibility, but the lack of limits applies to our anxieties, too. That’s the bargain.
A few months ago, I started experimenting with taking fewer photos. It started with a moment of lucidity on, of all places, my yoga mat. I’d only just sat down when I noticed a golden ray of sunlight falling across a stack of books to my left. I reached for my phone camera instinctually, but it wasn’t there. Too humiliated to stand up and get it, I decided to just look instead. (I talked about this moment in a podcast in early February.) Trite as it may sound, that light on those books presented me with an ordinary lesson about presence that, until then, I’d repeatedly failed to internalize. The photo I might have taken, however pretty, would have been useless compared to simply witnessing the beauty in the exact moment it was happening. That, right then, was its greatest purpose. Not as a memory, not as more detritus in my overstuffed camera roll. But simply a moment enjoyed. There was no need to hoard it. There was beauty everywhere. I could find more whenever I wanted.
My days are filled with sobering little realizations like that, quickly forgotten, but for some reason this one stuck. Maybe I’d listened to enough Alan Watts lectures or read and written enough articles about why modern Western life is annihilating our souls. Maybe I was finally ready to forget most of my life, if that’s what living fully demanded. In the months since, my relationship with taking photos has shifted. It can still be compulsive at times, like when I decided to capture the tree outside my apartment through every stage of its spring bloom, but I have a new awareness of its futility as a preservative. I’ve looked wistfully back on enough old photos by now—an activity that, however appealing, actually tends to make me sad—to recognize my present needs me far more than my past.
All this felt genuinely transformative, and then I found myself in the back of the car with Bug last week, wondering if I should take a photo in addition to the videos. I seemed obvious then that the brain worm had never really left. A price of technological progress that’s impossible to fully pay.
Bug is stable and home now, but I couldn’t ignore the irony of that experience punctuating the writing of this newsletter. Our interests in being present aside, we’re surrounded by and integrated with technology that forces us perpetually out of ourselves and into the role of narrating our lives through digital artifacts. And to what end? At what cost? When digital photography replaced film, we swapped problems of arguable virtue—intention, discernment, patience—and replaced them with unmitigated paranoia, disassociation, and self-interest. These are more existential concerns.
This is a useful reminder: We rarely “solve” problems without creating new ones. This is especially true in the profit-driven, convenience-obsessed tech field, which America has repeatedly charged with solving social problems, only to find ourselves in increasingly dire straits. But it’s relevant on a personal level, too. There is no version of life that’s free of problems. The goal is not to whack-a-mole every last one out of existence, but to recognize which of our problems add meaningful friction or texture to our lives—like being prosocial, or learning to be direct, or washing the dishes—versus those that alienate us further from each other and ourselves.
There is an old Buddhist proverb about this, that all of us have 84 problems, and that the only way to resolve them is by addressing the 84th, which is our desire to have no problems at all. Modern life is constantly selling us novel solutions, but fails to ask which problems are actually worth solving—or possible to solve at all. This comforts me, actually. If the dizzying depths of our camera rolls are any indication, there is no true solution to enjoying the present moment beyond the obvious directive that lies within.
My favorite article I read last week was “Traffic Jam,” by Leah Finnegan for The Baffler, an entertaining reflection on the death of “the viral internet,” i.e. the traffic-addled era of Buzzfeed’s reign. Last Friday’s 15 things also included my new bathrobe, musings on the myth of dopamine-fasting, three excellent movies, and more. The rec of the week was off-the-wall conversation-starters/hypotheticals, starting with one Danny famously raised on an old podcast episode.
Hope you have a nice Sunday,
Haley