Disposable - 8/16/19

I couldn’t sleep the other night and found myself scrolling through my Instagram feed in bed. To be honest, I wasn’t even really looking. It was just a habit. Like sucking on a pacifier, this was a meaningless addiction I was somewhat relying on to comfort my boredom and even poorer attempt to quiet my thoughts. To be more specific, my thumb was swiping up on my screen at two flicks per second and my eyes were glazed and half-open. I would estimate each beautifully curated image received 0.39 seconds of my “attention.”

The scrolling never stopped.

I eventually caught myself in the riptide and threw my phone across the mattress to try and get some shut-eye.

Many years ago, I cried over a hard drive crash that had digital photographs I had taken of a beautiful Ferrari F50, one of my favorite childhood automobiles. Up until that point I had only seen one in the flesh. I felt like I would never get another chance. Nowadays, my Instagram feed is flooded daily of most exotic cars (including the F50), their owners, and the millionaire lifestyle that comes with it. 

Every. Single. Day. 

With that ease of accessibility, eventually comes desensitization. With desensitization comes reduced appreciation. That’s not to say these works are less valuable. These creations still took as long as they did to come to fruition. But like anything else, the repeated and saturated exposure leads to its apparent “attention value” to decrease.  

Dare I say it. The exposure is almost too much.

Like other forms of creative content these days, photography has become disposable. Art. Music. Design. Food. Rarely do we truly see an image beyond two seconds. One one-thousand. Two one-thousand. Next! We snap a picture of our food and shove it into the hole in our face. A song gets reduced to thumping bass lines.

With new content constantly flooding our feed every single minute, attention is divided among them. You now have seconds to get your point across to internet audiences. Anything longer risks a complete shutdown of any attention. Repeated offenses can lead to frustration, fatigue, or a fatal silencing of your channel. This societal ADHD has become an epidemic and almost proudly worn.

Life has become TL;DR (short for Too Long, Didn't Read). We've handicapped all communication and discourse because our attention spans have become too short, while our emotional responses have gone sky-high.

Appreciating art on our devices now is like trying to enjoy the Louvre by running down the halls. DaVinci. Next! Michelangelo. Next! Works of art requiring years sometimes decades of mastery nowadays rarely get anything more than a glance. 

The feed never stops. 

The business model depends on it. The good gets muddled with the bad (and ads) and we are left to filter, which takes extra effort, so why bother? It is like being at a buffet where the food continues to pile on your plate longer after you are full.

What was I becoming?

I needed to slow the fuck down.

See. Listen. Taste.

The next time something intriguing comes across you, ask the question, “What did it take for this thing to come into existence?” A photographer needed to travel miles to a location. A design needed to be sketched and flushed out. A song needed to be crafted and iterated. A dish needed ingredients to be prepared and plated. Even a body needed to be sculpted over years of hard work. 

There is endless beauty once you peer through the lens of a content creator. You haven’t changed the content, but merely the way you consume it. If you are content illiterate, try and create something and you will understand.

Before you judge others from your couch, take a second to check yourself. It isn’t as easy as it may look.

If you are a content creator, don’t let the haters stop you. Listen or read to see if they have something to offer. Sometimes there is gold in the heaps of mud thrown your way. You won’t know until you suck it up and sort through that shit.

If no one is listening, don't let the silence stop you either.

At the end of the day, you are doing something.

My mind finally quieted that night to the thought of my existence, the amazing experiences I had in my life, and how grateful I was for all of it.

I reminded myself to have an iron mind, an open heart, and a hungry soul, for tomorrow is another day I get to live and appreciate more creations.

Fuck yeah, it's Friday!

Photo by Igor Miske on Unsplash