Enjoy the Moment

Making it to one of Lauren Mayberry’s solo shows had been at the top of my wish list for months. I nabbed one of two remaining tickets only a few hours before a Birmingham gig. After a drink and T-shirt purchase, the lights dimmed and the performance began. Lauren, the frontwoman of CHVRCHES, my long-time favorite band, belted out newly written songs inaugurating the start of a solo career. The crowd cheered and swayed. We were the privileged few, hearing brand new lyrics months before the rest of the world.

I shoved my phone in my back pocket, wanting to fully immerse myself in the moment. But my fingers kept wandering toward the device as if it were magnetized. I wanted to enjoy the show, but I also wanted to preserve it, to look at the scene through my screen and save some of it for later. Could I shoulder my way closer to the stage? Would my phone capture audio decently enough? Could I snap photos using flash without being annoying?

Frustrated by these distracting thoughts, I started to bargain with myself. I’ll record just this song, then put my phone away for the rest of the show. Or, I’ll take a few pictures right now and that’s all. But when the light show started in earnest, I couldn’t help it. I’m a sucker for fog and beam lights.

The nineteenth-century daguerreotype was the first publicly available photographing method. The complicated chemical process took thirty minutes to an hour to create a “truthful likeness” of an individual or a landscape. In the early days of the new technology, people who wanted a portrait had to sit perfectly still for up to fifteen minutes. Saving pictures for one’s memory or for posterity was a time-consuming, meditative process. And that was nothing compared to the laborious hand-copying necessary to preserve ancient texts before the printing press came along. Having cameras and the internet in our back pockets has changed all this. Within seconds, we can capture an experience and share it with friends, family, and people we’ll never meet.

Mobile devices have become the medium through which we experience our world and ourselves. A 2023 survey of 2,000 Americans found that the typical smartphone user stores close to 3,000 photos in their camera roll. Americans collectively snap 57,000 photos every second, with the average person using their camera six times daily. Survey respondents admitted to spending almost 40 percent of their time at weddings, graduations, concerts, or other events taking pictures.

Photograph by ververidis / Adobe Stock.

This desire to record is natural. But the ease with which we can now record comes with its own set of complications. “A popular medium [like the phone camera] molds what we see and how we see it—and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society,” Nicholas Carr writes in his landmark 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

Carr isn’t a lone prophet. Well before the advent of the smartphone, the philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan argued that “the effects of technology” would alter “patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.” Yes, the gadgets we use work strange magic in our lives, our brains, and even our souls.

Most people take pictures as a memory aid. It appears, however, that the use of electronic memory-augmenting devices steals our attention away from our experiences. And what we do not fully experience, we cannot fully remember. “When we’re hunting for the perfect Instagram shot,” science and health writer Brian Resnick says, “we’re not listening, we’re not smelling, we’re not always paying attention to the beautiful, complex minutiae that make up the moment.”

In Iceland, I accompanied a friend in the search for a particular field of lavender wildflowers. While the Nootka lupine grows throughout the country, there’s a particularly photo-worthy spot on the island’s southwestern coast that has made its way into many a travel account’s Instagram reels. We roamed beneath sifting gray skies and the spray of a stunning waterfall as my friend fumed at influencers for “gatekeeping” the most photo-worthy locations. (Apparently, this is a real problem in the travel industry.) She wanted her picture at the exact spot shown in those reels.

Thanks to constant internet access and the ubiquity of social media, we’ve begun to understand ourselves within the context of how we capture life, and not so much how we live.

Failing to find the field of flowers, we returned to the rental, scoured Apple Maps, drove a little further, then got out and searched again. But while we hunted for that precise location, we overlooked lovely glades roisterous with late-spring colors and viridian hillocks blooming with Instagram-worthy flowers of their own. While we sought to capture nature, we passed her by.

Eventually, we found a spot that was similar enough to what all the influencer types posted online, but only if we cropped the photo just right.

The very term “Instagram-worthy” demonstrates how that which we see as worth capturing distorts our attentiveness in the moment. How did experiences in nature come to be defined by the terms of the algorithm? How did the “good life” get reduced to what can be seen through the lenses of a phone camera?

Thanks to constant internet access and the ubiquity of social media, we’ve begun to understand ourselves within the context of how we capture life, and not so much how we live. We are no longer seeking but seizing. My first thought when something – anything – happens is to record it. Despite misgivings about this impulse, I often give in, filling my phone with countless images and videos. What am I trying to prove? That I’m living the good life – a life worth remembering and telling others about? But in so doing, I change what I see as the good life. Researchers examining posts marked #goodlife on Instagram found that use of the app “necessitates learning new ways of seeing that enable users to discern ‘Instagram-worthy’ content.”

When we adopt these new ways of seeing and, in the name of memory, regularly place the camera between ourselves and reality, we separate ourselves from the sensory universe. Thirty years before almost everyone in the developed world carried a camera everywhere, writer and critic Susan Sontag wrote that photographs were “a grammar” unto themselves and “even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.”

The most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images…. 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.

As we act on the semblance of power given to us by the picture – a semblance heightened by freely available photo-editing apps that allow us to manipulate images (and thus our memory) at will – we lose the capability to surrender ourselves to experiencing the world as it is. By trying to capture the concert and the field of flowers, I reduce them both to something that’s concrete but also limited and grossly inadequate. Hence the saying, pictures don’t do justice.

Losing our own memories is an unintended consequence of the age of technology. We try so hard to have our cake and eat it too. We want to enjoy the moment, except we can’t stop being distracted by our need to preserve it.

In 2018, researchers tracked two groups of tourists through the aesthetic and architectural marvel that is Stanford University’s Romanesque- and Byzantine-inspired Memorial Church. One group had phones and cameras. The other group went in empty-handed. A week after the tour, the participants were quizzed about what they remembered seeing, and those with a camera scored significantly lower than those without. “Just taking photos in general was enough to decrease scores on a memory test,” said Emma Templeton, a psychological researcher who co-authored the study.

And we don’t even need to have phones in hand to be affected. A study conducted among college students by Sunway University and the University of St. Andrews found that the mere presence of an unused smartphone during a test significantly reduced the ability of the students to memorize simple data. Even “phone conscious thought” – students thinking about their non-present smartphones – “showed a significant negative relationship” with recall.

Researchers found that media use during other activities, such as watching a TED Talk or visiting a tourist destination, “impairs memory in controlled and naturalistic studies” and in “solo and social experiences.”

Participants without media consistently remembered their experience more precisely than participants who used media…. Together, these findings suggest that using media may prevent people from remembering the very events they are attempting to preserve.

Our capability to remember digitally may end up being the death of memory itself. “All photographs are memento mori,” Sontag wrote. “Precisely by slicing out [a] moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

For the ancient Greeks, memory was not solely for the benefit of the individual or the community, but a way of connecting one to the gods. Michiel C. Van Veldhuizen, a scholar of Greek literature and religion, explains that the term anamnēsis (derived from the same source as the name of the goddess of memory) implies “one of the vertical bridges that relates mortality and divinity.…. The domain of memory, then, shapes the way in which humans have access to the divine.”

We want to enjoy the moment, except we can’t stop being distracted by our need to preserve it.

This relationship is recalled in Jesus’ words at the Last Supper: “Do this in memory (anamnēsin) of me.” Such active remembrance, where we deliberate on and even reenact the event, brings the past into the present. When we retell and relive the story, we approach it anew. It cannot be reduced to a frame, even if that frame is Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Such remembering is the antithesis of the shallow and one-dimensional storing of pixels on our devices to scroll through at whim.

None of this is to say that photography isn’t a fine art. Some of my favorite people take pictures for a living and I’ve often told friends that, if I weren’t a writer, I’d be a photographer. I love the act of framing, snapping, and preserving, at least as a hobby.

But our experiences, when reduced to the frame of our phone screens, also become reduced in our memories. Anamnēsis calls for more immersive recollection that utilizes not just our eyes, but our imaginations, our hands, our bodies, and our words to retell significant experiences, often in community with others.

All too frequently we interrupt our lives to record them. We clutter our already short timelines with feeble, hasty attempts to make them longer through digital preservation. And with these attempts, the very things we intend to remember slip away. Lines from a Mary Oliver poem come to mind: “How important it is to walk along, not in haste but slowly, / looking at everything and calling out. / … Imagination is better / than a sharp instrument.”

The sharp instruments of the twenty-first century benefit us only so much. We must relearn, as Oliver says, “our endless and proper work”: not outsourcing memorization to the digital realm, but practicing real attentiveness. If we are to remember, we must bear the risk of being enraptured by our experiences, and accept that we can’t possibly contain them.

Next time I’m traveling or going to a concert, perhaps I’ll challenge myself to not take any pictures. And if that fails, I’ll at least try not to post them online.