On Capturing a Moment
and making it count
It is often those moments that we believe we will always remember that we are the first to forget: excursions with friends, the tastes of amazing foods, natural wonders and man-made art, and the feeling of accomplishment after a win.
A cottage industry has sprung up around trying to stop this kind of forgetting. But it is, I think, confused. It is worth trying to explain why.
Living In the Moment
This will be the most familiar and obvious answer to our problem.
When we raise our complaint in the first place, we might receive a response of the following kind: We are worried about forgetting the important things, but they say it is actually we who are making a mistake. The real thing to worry about is the possibility that we are wasting our time, not filling it with the things that really do count.
And in a way, this is an answer as to why we forget. We are so focused on the past, on trying to control things that we have no power over, that we fail to do what counts in the present and have, therefore, nothing to remember. If we filled our days living a 'YOLO' philosophy, as this line of thought goes, then we'll have made the most of our time (I am being cheeky, but I think also accurate).
While widespread, you'll notice that this piece of advice really does not answer our initial question. Our issue wasn't that we weren't doing exciting things, but that there seems to be no way to ensure that the important things we doremain with us.
Simply saying, then, "Oh, you should do more exciting things! You should live in the moment!" does not solve our problem. It is an answer to the question of how we should fill our time—but that is a question we can ask *later.* As of now, it does nothing but give us more to forget.
But we might expect, given how widespread the advice to "live in the moment" is, that there is a grain of truth to it. And there is. While it isn't helpful to say that we ought not to try to change the past and, rather, focus on the now, this advice is also right in a way: we are not doing enough. It is not a sheer number of experiences we are lacking, nor are we trying to change what cannot be, but we are failing to do something with the experiences, the moments, that matter to us. We aren't making them ours. And because of that, we forget them--and they pass over and through us.
Remembering Better
I now want to turn to a modern solution to this problem. Through various strategies, like photography, we can attempt to augment our memory, or remember the things that matter at the right moment. This also feels empty, but in seeing why we will learn something about what it is we really want, and how to provide for it.
Whenever one opens a 'Photos' app, it is unlikely they will be met with a chronological presentation of photos. Rather, with the power of artificial intelligence, phone manufacturers have begun to recommend and surface past memories. 'X-Years-Ago' collages are automatically created for us, we are shown friends we may have forgotten, and more.
Put the AI aside for a second. This brings out another way we try to 'capture' moments. We capture a photograph. We aim our camera at a group of friends, a beautiful landscape, click the button, and there we have it. The scene lives forever on our phones or cameras.
Yet, mere photography is not enough. It is, like the 'YOLO' philosophy, simply another thing to forget. Our galleries grow unimaginably large, and yet, ironically, the first and last time we look at a photo is often immediately after taking it. We forget it is there just as we forget the moment we had tried to capture.
It is this problem that phone manufacturers have attempted to apply artificial intelligence to. Instead of leaving photos to be forgotten, our devices present them to us a few years later, or in a collage. This is undeniably an improvement, but it once again pushes the problem down the line without solving it. Sure, we might be reminded of a moment; we might suddenly be thrown back into our old selves, once again never wishing to forget it, but we do. We see a 'memory,' have a nice moment of nostalgia, and then forget it all over again. AI photo surfacing fails as well.
And this draws out the fact that mere memory is not what we, at the end of the day, truly desire. It is not sufficient to quiet our concern. Sure, we might see the photo every day (maybe we set it as our home screen), but even *this* will not satisfy us. We will get bored of looking at it, or it will cease to matter. So what do we even want!?
We were misguided. We thought that photos were a tool for memory, but then it turned out that memory wasn't precisely what we wanted. Yet, we still take photos. It is worth thinking about why.
This much is clear: we try to take photos of the moments that count because we think that, in doing so, we will have captured them somehow. And we do not necessarily think that the photo itself is what does the capturing. Rather, the activity of photo-taking is supposed to change something for us; it is supposed to alter our relation to the event we wish to keep as ours.
This is why, after all, one might make a fake camera with their hands and verbally produce a 'clicking' sound to mimic a camera's shutter. It is, thus, less that we want to be visually reminded of a time and more that we hope to, through some activity, through photo-making, make the moment our own.
And this sheds a bit of light on why those memory collages are either plain annoying or forgettable. They address the wrong side of the issue. It is not the having or 'being reminded' of aspect of photography that helps us make moments ours, but the creative act itself.
Making a moment ours
Of course, if the creative act of photography were sufficient on its own, then we would not have a problem in the first place. So more is required. What could this mystical activity, one that allows us to make the moments that matter properly our own, possibly be?
We might begin by considering the ways that the 'YOLO' philosophy and memory-surfacing fail. Both push the problem down the line. Neither solution forces us to focus on the moments we care so much about. The advice to live in the moment only tells us to *do* more, not *how* to do things, and though AI and photos help us remember things, they leave an abstract kind of work for us to do. Our job is not complete. So, then, we need to relate to our experience in a certain way, one that the live-in-the-moment philosophy doesn't provide for, and the photography advice merely gestures at.
And what is there to do? What is it that both the 'take a photo' and 'YOLO' approaches miss? I want to suggest that they both overlook a simple piece of advice. We need to think about the moment we wish to make our own.
Neither approach leads us to ask why we care about the moment we're trying to capture, or what makes it worth saving. In fact, they do quite the opposite. They pull our attention away from it, from our friends, from the landscape, and lead us to focus on an entirely different subject: the framing of a photo or what else we could be doing to make the most of our limited time. Ironically, it is just this that prevents us from fully appreciating the moment we wish to enjoy.
I've experienced this in a particularly sharp way. My freshman year of college, I studied abroad and visited London. I have vague memories of the landscape and the river Themes, but what I remember most of all from that trip, was the internal conversation had with myself -- I asked "what will I remember? How can I ensure that I remember how beautiful this all is?" And how ironic that it is this conversation, and not the very things themselvesI wished to remember that I find myself returning too!
So, then, this is the mistake we ought to avoid. We must keep our focus on the moment, on our friends, on the landscape. In doing this, we might ask ourselves what is so special about this scene, this architectural feat, this painting, this group of people. It is precisely by asking ourselves what is so special and magical about it that we can truly appreciate it--and, in a sense, properly capture it.
Indeed, to capture a moment, we must refrain from intellectualizing it, from thinking about how much we want to remember it. But at the same time, we cannot let it pass us by. So we must be thoughtful, not about our memory or about what it is to "waste time," but about the thing itself. And then, maybe, we'll have found that special kind of ownership, that special kind of relating.