u/Dreamy_Jackal

When I scroll for minutes to hours, I mostly tend to look at visually pleasing stuff. Shorts or longer videos that may look colorful, unusual or tasty, but rarely have any really useful information in them.

After a while I tried summarizing what I have been learning all day long, as I think that exercising your thinking is really important for your mental health and it'd be a shame to let your capacities go to waste.

I basically wasted days and weeks not learning a single thing while watching the same shorts to somehow please my mind and I wasn't happy.

I figure that most articles would be the same repeating topics over and over again, so I try to focus on books and magazines, and finding more to read instead of scrolling out of boredom. Or to fall into rabbit holes online that actually give me something new to learn.

I also realized just how uninterested people have become while scrolling through the same nonsense every say, and it's sad how difficult it is nowadays to have a meaningful conversation. :/

Trying to be a minimalist is really difficult when everyone around you doesn't give a damn, but I've come to a point where most things digital annoy me more than are boredom-breakers, and I'm satisfied with that! :)

Having a smartphone with a good camera can be very practical. You don't necessarily need a big, heavy or fragile professional cam to make really beautiful photographs.

When something astounding appears right in front of you, you can snap it right away, and post it too if you'd really like.

But instead of snapping the greatest memories, people started to immortalize literally everything they can find.

Beautiful, shiny, pretty, funny... or even harrowing.

I myself have around 20 thousand pictures on my phone alone, even more saved on an external harddrive.

But after starting to travel around a bit, to places I haven't seen in a long time, or only on pictures, I realized something:

Photographs have their own beauty, their own art, but no matter how perfectly snapped they are, they could never feel like the real thing.

I enjoy photography a lot, but I realized that watching something with your own eyes, letting it sink in, gives me a much stronger felt experience.

To watch something quietly, be it nature, an animal or flower, a city, a museum or an old building, makes you feel much more connected than to snap a pic, post it on insta and forget about it in two secs.

It has to do with a type of mindfulness too, I guess, when you take out your smartphone for the fifth picture of a pretty insect you only stare at a screen, at something two-dimensional, it rips you out of the experience again, your mind couldn't relax even if it wanted to.

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Another thing I realized is when I was snapping one of my cats. Just how many times did my cats and any other living being see not my stupid face, but a lifeless lens in front of them?

How many times do they remember this lens instead of me, just because I *really* needed a picture of my cute cat in an unusual pose?

Just to forget this picture in five minutes? How much time did I waste photographing instead of cuddling my cats?

Not all of my cats are here anymore, that's why it's a thought that kinda haunts me sometimes.

I wish I would've spent my time with them more aware.

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I think the relentlessly fast internet makes us very insecure about our own memory.

At least in my case, I often photograph things to not forget them.

After trying to finally stop that I felt just how insecure I was with the simplest of things.

Remembering a number? The brand of an old thing I found? A book's title?

Yes, it could be due to my mental health, and many people are extremely stressed, but being used to snap every single letter of a word is far too convenient, I let my memory finally exercise again, it fell asleep for all of these years!

I think photography can be a beautiful hobby, and many pictures turn out gorgeous, but I think pictures should be way of remembering something *you* experienced dearly, instead of being the only experience you were able to get on that journey.