Today’s social media climate seems to be an ever growing competition. Who has the best Instagram aesthetic? Who has the most likes? Who is verified? How many followers do you have? Due to this attitude toward social media, people are increasingly living to build their social media influence. When we go somewhere new, we often take a picture thinking, “I can’t wait to share this on Instagram or Facebook… or both!”
Our social media accounts can even influence the way that we take pictures. It is a common occurrence to hear people saying how they can’t post a picture because it doesn’t “match their aesthetic.” We groom the way that we experience moments so that we are better able to present them on social media at a later point.
At the same time, I would say that the growing influence of social media has given people a platform to share their photography which, in turn, has encouraged a dramatic growth in the amount of people who pursue or are passionate about photography. This is not necessarily a negative quality of social media but it is important to note how this need to capture a moment on camera has impacted how we experience a moment, in and of itself.
Given all of this, you might be asking yourself, how do we manage to both live in the moment and capture it? Is it even possible?
I think the answer is really a restructuring of priorities. I often find myself wondering when social media became such a priority to society. To those of us in college right now, I think that the presence of social media really snuck up on us and we don’t even realize how big a part of our lives it is. My curiosity led me down an internet spiral of trying to figure out how many hours the average person spends on social media per day. SocialMediaToday published an article stating that we spend around nine hours a day on social media and even tells us which platforms are the most common. Depending on which view you believe, it seems that the answer ranges between 7-11 hours. Woah. Scrolling through your feed is practically a full time job!
In fact, if you define a “moment” as a single minute, then we are spending somewhere around 660 moments tweeting, liking, commenting, sharing, or interacting with some type of social content. Those are 660 missed opportunities to experience something amazing in life.
On the importance of moments:
While there are many important advantages of the social media world, as a society, we need to prioritize living to live, instead of living to post.
So the next time you find yourself laughing with friends at your favorite hangout, watching the sun set behind the Olympic Mountains, walking through the city while the lights glint off the rain puddles in the street, traveling to a new and exciting destination, or finding a secret chill spot, ask yourself if your first priority should be to capture the moment for your feed or if your priority should be to be fully present and soak in this unique and extraordinary moment.