The following piece is an opinion and does not reflect the views of The Eagle and its staff. All opinions are edited for grammar, style and argument structure and fact-checked, but the opinions are the writer’s own.
As an aspiring photojournalist, I’ve spent the past three years slinging my camera over my shoulder and documenting nearly everything I see. Even when I’m not reporting, I’m constantly observing the world through a lens, watching myself move through life in third person. And I’m sick of it.
Don’t get me wrong — capturing moments can be meaningful. Photography can preserve memories, tell stories and connect us to others. But pulling out your phone at every social gathering, every cute dog on the street or every time you’re too lazy to pull out a notebook in class is doing more harm than good.
When was the last time you actually looked back at those six videos from that one Harry Styles concert three years ago? When was the last time you spent the entire time watching a movie, thinking about what you were going to write on Letterboxd? When was the last time you scrolled through your own Instagram feed, tweaking it to appear effortlessly “authentic?”
I currently have 14,037 photos in my camera roll. And maybe you have more or perhaps you only have a couple of hundred (how?), but either way, we are all becoming disconnected from our lived experiences.
We’ve turned moments into content, memories into data and life into an endless highlight reel. Whether you’re active on social media or not, whether you have 14,000 photos or just a couple hundred, we all feel the pressure to perform and document every experience.
The problem is that in trying to preserve every moment, we stop fully living in them. Overdocumentation fragments our attention. It pulls us out of the present and into a constant state of evaluation. Every experience becomes something to capture rather than something to feel. Psychologists call an extreme version of this “Depersonalization Disorder”: the act of seeing yourself as an object from the outside, as an image to be curated. It’s exhausting, and it’s isolating.
There’s also a deeper loss beneath all the digital clutter. When we rely on photos and posts to remember our lives, our brains stop doing the work themselves. Studies show that excessive photographing actually weakens memory formation, because we outsource the act of remembering to our devices. The more we document, the less we remember.
And perhaps worst of all, this obsession with recording has dulled our sense of wonder. We attend concerts to film them, not to feel them. We travel to new places just to prove we’ve been there. We live not for experience, but for evidence.
At the end of the day, you can reminisce on those photos as much as you want, but they’ll never encapsulate what it was actually like to be in that moment. Instead, you lose your chance at understanding that feeling when you spend it staring through a screen instead of your own eyes.
As Susan Sontag wrote in her essay “In Plato’s Cave,” “to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge — and, therefore, like power.”
But that power has limits. When every moment becomes something to be captured, we lose the ability to simply exist within it.
Maybe we don’t need to photograph every sunset or film every laugh. Maybe it’s okay for some moments to live only in memory, to fade naturally, imperfectly, as part of the texture of being alive. Isn’t that impermanence what makes these individual moments truly special after all?
Because if you’re always behind the camera, you’re never really in the picture.
Natalie Monga is a senior in the School of Communication.
This article was edited by Quinn Volpe, Alana Parker, Addie DiPaolo and Walker Whalen. Copy editing done by Avery Grossman, Sabine Kanter-Huchting, Arin Burrell, Paige Caron and Andrew Kummeth. Fact-checking done by Aidan Crowe.
