How to Take a Walk down Memory Lane (HIMYM)

This week, I scoured my camera roll in hopes of finding campaign gold for my NHS video.  Between thousands of pictures and hundreds of videos, I realized that the most photogenic moments aren't always caught on camera.  The moments that represent the little things—a high five, a hand up, cheering on a teammate, the creation of that legendary inside joke—find refuge in memories.  In taking pictures and documenting every little thing we do, not to mention our own faces as they change over time (forever chasing that coveted "glo up"), we make a spectacle of things that society views as important, but in reality, the moments that we truly cherish are kept private.  They are the memories we value the most—because we have no insurance policy backing them.

The moments we tell ourselves are important: a wedding, a graduation, a baby shower, that we painstakingly stage to seem "picture perfect" offer only "a semblance of knowledge" into emotion.  What happens behind the lens of the camera tell a real story; what happens in front of it stages a production. The freeze-frames taken today on DSLRs or iPhone 7s may rack up thousands of "likes," but are about as intangible as our ever-dwindling appreciation for life. 

 We're too focused on getting the lighting right on our picture of an aesthetic lunch to truly taste that panini we ordered; we follow our peers on Instagram before we learn their deepest fears and greatest ambitions; we filter out (literally) the imperfections of our life before we realize that we're unhappy.

Our incessant snapping of our lives has given us nothing but a disjointed image of existence.  Now, the sentiment of "life flashing before your eyes," is no longer considered a rare occurrence, present just on the windowsill between life and the grip of death, but rather a mainstreamed form of quasi-sentimentalism brought to us by the makers of Flipagram and Snapchat stories.  Only now, instead of signaling the end of life, these fleeting images signal the end of living.