#160 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Monday October 4)
Greetings,
I’ve been thinking a lot about the legacies we will leave behind for future generations to appreciate who we were, what we did and what we valued.
I’m not talking about all the technological, medical, artistic and other accomplishments of our society. Nor am I talking about the environmental degradation, poor financial management and challenges in health care that afflict us today. This isn’t about politics or policy. But how did we live as people? Not our leadership, our celebrities and our artists, but people in everyday life.
The great transformation of our everyday lives is the access to information (true and not—curated and randomly assembled) and the ubiquity of communication and the recording of information—for good and for ill.
The image that may define our times might be the “selfie.” We are the most visually represented generation in human history. We take pictures of everything, from every angle. It is difficult to attend any sort of event without multiple cell phones taking multiple photos that will be stored “in the cloud,” most of which will never be seen again.
In some sense we are photographing more while doing—while appreciating experiences less.
ORGANIZING AND DIGITIZING PICTURES
In our photographing our lives, we have been spoiled by being able to take photos with impunity and without cost. Back when many of us were kids, our parents admonished us to be careful with the camera and not take too many pictures, since each one cost 20 cents or so to develop. In the “old days” we had to compose our photos more carefully. And with this came a tendency to take fewer photos and live in the moment more.
When I initially took digital pictures (quaintly stored on a chip one removed from the camera to then store the photos on the computer), they were relatively easy to organize. These were earlier times and remembering to bring a camera and then pull it out reduced the tendency to photograph everything. Now the cameras are in our pockets and there is no limit to the number of pictures one can take.
I always enjoyed taking pictures when I was a kid. That said, I suspect that I am not one of the more prolific these days. Even so, I am now paralyzed by the sheer volume of the photos on my computer and trying to figure out how to get them organized. It is indeed possible that there is “too much of a good thing.”
TO SAVE AND DELETE
Going “back in time,” there are many photos from my childhood and from my parents’ youth. I have submitted many of them to a company for digitization. There still are far too many (there we are again—the need to prune the vast volume of photos). They are a wonderful reminders of days gone by. As I look at them, the people in them come alive once more. When I stop to consider the many photos on my computer, I realize these photos will be seen by very few people. I have realized that having so many views of the same event or location probably defeats the whole purpose. One really needs only a few photos to capture the sense of a moment in time or to peer into the personality of the person being photographed (or, for that matter, what sparked the photographer to capture the moment). If what we are doing is sending a time capsule to those who follow us, fewer is better. No sense dulling their senses or detracting from their appreciation of a single moment frozen in time with multiple photos of the same thing.
I think it’s time for us all to de-clutter our photo albums. When I first considered this, my initial inclination was to go through and delete the awkward photos. But, upon reflection, I wonder whether it actually makes more sense to retain those awkward photos, taken without warning, and delete the posed photos. Rather than a series of perfectly curated photos of pre-posed people in their perfect smiles, aren’t the real memories for people in more natural, candid, even unflattering, moments? It is the awkward and the candid shots that display our personalities—for today and into the future.
WELCOME BACK, TED LASSO
Not as good as the amazing—and much needed pandemic respite—that was the first season. The second season is not quite as good but still pretty darned funny and earnest. Pick it up on Apple+. It still is heartwarming, juvenile, and amusing, even if more than a little saccharine. But you’ll smile.
SELF RELIANCE
A final word on taking responsibility for one’s own circumstance comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson, in “Self-Reliance”:
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
Have a good day,
Glenn
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