All about the pics - a free-write

When I was a kid, my dad used to take an incessant number of pictures. My least favorite part of family vacations was the pictures. I found it so unnecessary. Take one picture, take a few, don't take a million. "Stand there. Pose there. Smile! No, don't smile like that! That's a fake smile!" Give me a break! What is the point? I knew when we were taking those photos that we would never look at 90% of them again. And we never did. A few years ago, my dad transferred all those photos onto an external hard drive. One of the benefits of the transfer was that we knew just how many photos he had taken throughout my childhood. The number was close to 108,000.

Now, what percentage of these photos do you think I will see again? I would say .0000001%. Almost all of those pictures did not matter then, and they do not matter now. But what those pictures did do is interrupt perfectly good family vacations. The time we wasted taking pictures could have been used to enjoy the things that were right in front of us. And that is fucking criminal. I believed that then, and I believe that to this day.

Around the time I was a teenager, I was introduced to social media. What started out as Sconex and Myspace ended up as Facebook. Initially, I loved social media. I loved looking at the picture posted by all my classmates. I loved posting, it made me feel cool. I loved stalking hot girls from my classes. I couldn't get enough. That lasted about 10 years. When I entered the workforce, social media took a back seat because I started doing things of real consequence.

Then one day I was scrolling through Facebook, and I realized that being on social media wasn't making me happy. It was actually making me quite unhappy. When you are bombarded with the best part of everyone else's lives it is easy to fall into the trap of comparison. As the saying goes, comparison is the thief of joy. So, just like that, I deleted my social media. But before doing so I saved all my Facebook pictures on my hard drive. I had some great pics from high school and college, pictures that I would want to show my children. It felt like a waste to destroy them forever.

I still hated taking pictures in general. I simply preferred to appreciate the life that I had in front of me firsthand. Then I got a girlfriend, bless her heart. Two things changed for me when I met Mrs. Right Now. The first was that I started spending a lot of time on my phone. Facetime should be fucking banned, but that is a different conversation for another day. The second thing that changed was the number of pictures I started taking. Women, in all their glory, love to see what you are seeing when they are not there. So, I started taking pictures to make her happy.

The relationship ended—to everyone's surprise—but I started to understand why people took pictures. If you only take a few, you can capture the essence of some beautiful moments, and that is a good thing. But the keywords there are “a few.” Taking a few pictures is fine. Taking many is not fine. Taking many of yourself in the mirror should be a diagnosable disease (editor’s note). You look fine, honey.

I came back to social media a few months ago. This time it was Instagram. I came back to promote the very blog you are reading right now. Everyone I talked to told me I simply had to have one. Social media presented an opportunity to grow my audience and, as someone who wanted to keep an open mind, I tried it. Well, that lasted a couple of weeks.

I posted every time I put out a new story. I told a good amount of people about the account. I went to events and got people to follow my Insta but at the end of the day, it did not lead to one new reader. It is also a shit ton of work to promote anything on social media. Between writing, my day job, and promoting I would have little to no time left to do things worth writing about. So I stopped promoting.

But what I did have time to look at was all the hot chicks on Instagram. Oh, my god. I have lived quite a long time, and I have never seen more beautiful women in my life. It got to a point that there was absolutely no way that these chicks are as hot in real life as they are in their pictures. It is flat-out impossible. Also, they are showing a lot of ass. I like skin as much as the next guy, but is this really the way you want to go about getting attention? It says a lot about you, and what it says is not great.

So I uninstalled Instagram. After a while, a man gets bored of hot fictional chicks. They will always have a special place in my heart though. Love you hot fictional chicks! It became a distraction I did not need. There are simply better things that I could be doing with my time, like, I don't know, maybe writing more? You would not believe how many people in the world today sincerely believe that promoting my writing on social media would make me a better writer than actually writing more!

At the end of the day, I am an old-school type of guy. I know there are a million new ways to be successful and blah blah blah, but I am going to go with the time-tested way. Hard work and dedication. I will continue to focus most of my energy on writing more to be the best writer that I can be. I have given myself three years to dedicate to writing, if something big doesn't break by then, I will put down the proverbial pen and never write again.

Social media has become so much bigger than I could have ever imagined when I first joined Sconex all those years ago. Not only is it big business, but it has also provided a market for many people to make a great living. The capitalist in me loves this. But I can't help but think that more and more people are starting to realize that, unless you are one of the people that are able to monetize social media, you face a lot of adverse side effects. Primarily the anxiety it causes. I think over time this realization will lead to less and less social media use. I hope.

However, the thing that we seem most addicted to as modern people is attention. That is why we take so many pictures of ourselves and post them online. We want to be loved and respected. We want the eyes on us. On some level, we have convinced ourselves that we are not good if people do not believe that we are good, and that is a shame. Just know that someone who has an unfathomable appetite for attention also probably has some issues with self-esteem. The two go hand in hand.

A few weeks ago I tried to find my old Facebook pictures. I tried to pull them up on my hard drive but was unable to. The files would not open. So, I tried to reboot my Facebook. Turns out that if you delete your account, and don't reactivate it over the next two years, then the account is gone forever. It made me quite sad.