We Document Our Whole Lives Online – but Should We?

YOUR 15 MINUTES IS OVER –

Feb. 8, 2024 – ‘You Don’t Need To Document Everything’ questioned it all. The essay was promoted by a video taken on New Year’s Eve in Paris, which showed hundreds of people recording the fireworks and countdown on their phones. Instead of being fully immersed in the excitement of another year coming to a close … the crowd was watching the festivities, or more accurately, recording them through their phones. India writes that people excuse their worrying need to document everything by arguing that they ‘just want to remember things’, but she challenges that assertion: “They will likely never watch that video back, and if they’re posting it online, that’s not for memories; it’s for attention.” While we record our most intimate moments, from the birth of our children, the funerals of our parents, pregnancy reveals, marriage proposals to telling our partners that we love them for the first time, India contends that social media doesn’t just make us stressed, anxious and depressed, but it also takes so much time from our already very short lives: “I think if this generation is on track to regret anything it will be the time we wasted documenting and editing and filtering and marketing ourselves for social media. Time we will never get back.”