Yesterday, I watched a woman meticulously prepare her smoothie bowl for forty-five minutes. Right there in the café where I was trying to work. First she carefully placed slices of strawberries in a perfect semicircle around the edge of the bowl.
Then blueberries, placing each one individually.
Banana slices. Tiny spoonfuls of chia seeds.
Her friend sat beside her the whole time, smiling and patiently waiting while their entire conversation was put on pause. Which was honestly the tame part. The annoying part was when she put the finishing touches on her masterpiece, pulled out her phone, took seventeen nearly identical photos of her bowl from marginally different angles, picked one, filtered it, and posted it with the caption: Life’s not about waiting for the storm to pass… It’s learning to dance in the rain.
#LiveInTheMoment #BeHereNow #Mindfulness
I almost spit out my latte. Now, hold up. Before you get all judgy on me – I’m not judging anyone.
I’m not your mom yelling at kids to get off her lawn. I’m not an old man shouting at teenagers about their dang phones. This is not some rant against technology or millennials.
I have every single one of those apps. I’ve taken my fair share of sunset photos that I’ll never look at again. What bothers me is just how absurdly contradictory it all feels.
Like everyone is buying into this mindfulness bullshit but refusing to introspect about why or how. I know I’m not the first person to notice this. You’ve seen the memes.
The Instagram posts of gorgeous people standing on mountain peaks with captions like Feel grounded? Remember to unplug and take a deep breath. (Immediately posted to Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter) The tweet telling you to put your phone away and be present in the moment that someone clearly didn’t spellcheck while looking at their phone.
The entire TikTok genre dedicated to teaching you how to be present while someone else spent seven hours making that TikTok. My friend Lisa invited me on what she described as “a nice little hike so we can unplug for a bit.” It sounded great. Some fresh air, some exercise, some human conversation – didn’t really matter where we went.
The trailhead parking lot was mostly empty when I arrived. Lisa was already there with four other strangers. Great, more new friends!
Except none of us spoke to each other for the first twenty minutes because everyone was making sure to get the right “starting hike” content. One girl had packed an entire outfit change just so she could take a selfie at the summit. One guy had a bloody drone with him.
A DRONE. On a hike we were “taking a break from technology” to hike. “I just wanna get a good before picture!” Lisa insisted, making sure her water bottle was at the perfect angle next to her jacket with the GPS map hanging out, her brand-new Adventure Consultants cap just so on her head.
I awkwardly hovered to the side like I had missed some sort of plot-point. Conversation was great once we got moving. Although every lookout point turned into a half-hour photo shoot.
Lisa actually asked me to take a photo of her sitting cross-legged on a rock behind us with her staring longingly out at the valley. “Make sure it looks like I don’t know you’re taking a picture though, okay?” she said. “Like I’m just contemplating life.”
Yep.
Totally captures how unpredictable life can be up here. It all peaked when we summited. Everyone whipped out their phones which they’d apparently muted but not turned off because we were “still taking a break.” Drone-boy inflated his drone so he could take an aerial shot.
Lisa popped her phone onto a tiny tripod she’d somehow strapped to her pack the entire time. “You got a caption in mind for today?” I asked, rolling my eyes so hard they nearly fell out of my head. Lisa looked at me blankly.
“Um. Something about how the best times are when you don’t take pictures and just enjoy mother nature.”
My eyelids slammed together so hard I thought they were never going to come back down. The thing is.
I don’t think she saw any irony in that statement. And I don’t think any of the others did either. What I love/hate about this whole trend is that no one seems to see how ridiculously absurd it is.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it after the hike. Once you start to notice it, you see it EVERYWHERE. Instagram wellness guru I follow who posted an entire Story ranting about how being on social media all the time rots your ability to live in the present.
Complete with a swipe-up link to her new digital detox program. My cousin who spent our entire family dinner taking photos of us ALL “enjoying each other’s company” and then ended up missing the conversation at dinner so she could spend an hour carefully selecting filter and writing the perfect Are families really everything? caption.
The yoga retreat I went on where our teacher opened by telling everyone to “Leave all outside distractions at the door” and then spent the entire morning having her assistant take photos of all our poses for the retreat’s Instagram. I texted this theory to my flatmate Priya, who works in digital marketing, and she shrugged. “It’s Instagram mindfulness,” she texted back without even looking away from her screen.
“No one wants to be present. They just want to look like the type of person who’s into being present.”
Wow. Fuck.
She’s totally right isn’t she? We’re not living our best lives for ourselves. We’re taking Snapchat Stories of living our best lives so other people know we’re living our best lives.
It’s not about actually drinking your matcha latte mindfully. It’s about posting that you’re about to drink your MATCHA LATTE so everyone knows you exercise, eats healthy food, and only drinks the trendiest of beverages. I put this theory into practice last weekend at a picnic with some friends.
It was pouring cliches at that point. We were sitting in the park on a perfect sunny day. Food out.
Everyone chatting. Life was good. So I asked everyone to put their phones in a pile and pick them back up in 15 minutes.
“Let’s just hang out and be present with each other for a bit.”
People act like you’re proposing some sort of communist manifesto when you ask them to not look at their phones. “What if there’s an emergency?” one friend panicked. “I have to make sure my dog walker is doing good,” said another.
“I’m expecting a really important email,” said someone else. Fine. We compromised on 30 minutes of no phones.
You know what happened in that half hour? Nothing. NOTHING.
Well actually one of us almost spilled her drink but that’s about it. But several of us spent that whole half hour EYEING THE PHONE PILE like it was filled with defective baby chickens we were responsible for babysitting. And then when the time was up, we all scrambled to grab our phones like they were about to swallow us whole.
Two seconds later Mark was snapping a food-pic, Hannah was scrolling through Instagram, and Tom was replying to work emails. “This is so great, isn’t it?” Hannah said without looking up at anyone. “Friends just hanging out, being present with each other.”
I nearly hurled my sandwich at that girl.
The craziest part is I’m just as guilty as everyone else. See, me being all high-and-mighty about other people would hate. I find myself doing the exact same shit.
Last week I went for a solo wander along the canal so I could clear my head. No phone. No distractions.
Just me and my damn yogi self. It was a nice afternoon. Ducks paddling around in the water.
Yellow leaves starting to fall from the trees. What did I do? Fished out my phone to take a photo of “this nice quiet moment” to show… FRIENDS?
Posted it with some stupid caption about breathing and living in the now? Documenting empties your brain faster than you actually living your damn life. I swore myself right back into my phone pocket, mortified.
But half an hour later the sun was hitting a patch of canal just RIGHT and I thought, “Eh screw it. One photo…”
See!? We can’t experience something and know we had the experience without making sure everyone else knows we had the experience.
Like a tree falling in the woods but nobody’s there to Instagram it doesn’t actually fall. Take a sunrise-pic that you immediately trash without even looking at cuz what’s the point if no one saw you wake up early and admire nature? *INSTAGRAM*
My friend Theo is doing a PhD in neuroscience and she says there’s actually studies done about this.
Something about how taking photos of moments means our brains don’t actually have to form a memory of that moment because THE PHOTO DOES IT FOR US. So not only are we not living in the moment BY MAKING OTHER PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT THE MOMENT, we won’t even remember it THAT WELL come tomorrow because we didn’t form a memory of it. Great.
FUCKING GREAT. Another thing that really bothers me about all this is how sad it is. Did we take every available opportunity to show people how amazing our lives are so now we can’t even sit quietly with ourselves?
Is a meditation retreat no longer meditation if you Snapchat every second of it? Hell. When I go hiking now, I catch myself looking for photo-worthy scenes just to imagine what people would caption that.
“I bet this is where they filmed that movie,” I said out loud to absolutely no one while hiking last week. The hikes we take aren’t for us anymore. They’re for the cringe influencers who’ll repost our selfie at the summit for extra likes.
My mum thinks this is fucking hysterical. She still has a flip phone. And refuses to use Facebook because “it’s too complicated.”
“In my day,” she said to me the other week as we sat enjoying our “quality time together with no phones,” “we’d have experiences and then tell people about them afterwards if they asked.
Sometimes we didn’t tell people at all!”
Imagine that. Experiences just for you. Maybe that’s what we need to focus on.
Not being hailed as the coolest, most mindful people on social media. But actually being that in private. Not because it’ll look a certain way on your resume.
But because being alive is enough. I’m trying. Half the time I bomb, but I’m trying.
Last Sunday I watched a whole sunset without taking a single photo. Just sat on a park bench and watched the sky go from orange to pink to black.
Felt the air get cooler as night fell.
Said f*ck loudly to myself when a seagull tried to poop on my leg. I lived in that moment, experienced it, and didn’t feel the need to text about it later. And you know what friends?
? It was amazing.
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