Life Has Stopped Being About Living

Are we sometimes so busy watching, recording, and sharing life that we forget to actually experience it?

I’ve been thinking recently about how much of our lives are lived through a screen.

We take photographs of the things we are doing. We share where we are going. We tell people what we are eating, seeing, and experiencing. And then we scroll through the lives of other people, seeing their holidays, their achievements, their relationships, their homes and their seemingly perfect moments.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of this.

Sharing something we enjoy can be lovely. Social media can help us stay connected, particularly with people who don't live nearby.

But I wonder whether sometimes we can become so caught up in **showing life and watching other people's lives that we lose touch with our own.**

When experiencing becomes documenting

I've noticed this in myself when travelling.

I used to try to fit as much as possible into a day. I wanted to see everything, visit everywhere and make the most of every opportunity.

And yet sometimes I'd come home feeling exhausted rather than restored. I had seen and done so much that the experiences almost seemed to merge into one another.

More recently, I've started doing things differently.

I might do less in a day. I might sit somewhere for longer. I might walk without needing to get anywhere in particular. I might stop and listen to what is around me.

• The sounds.
• The smells.
• The feeling of the air.
• The place I'm sitting.
• The person I'm with.

And I've noticed something quite simple:

When I stop trying to fit everything in, I often experience more.

We can do the same thing online

Social media can make it very easy to compare our everyday lives with somebody else's carefully selected moments.

We see the holiday but not the argument beforehand.

The beautiful home but not the difficult week.

The achievement but not the years of uncertainty that came before it.

The happy family photograph but not what happened five minutes before the picture was taken.

We are comparing our  "whole life" with somebody else's "highlight reel".

Research into social media use has found associations between passive scrolling, social comparison and poorer wellbeing. This doesn't mean that social media causes poor mental health in every person, or that using it is inherently harmful. How we use it matters, as do what we are exposed to and how we respond to it.

For some people, scrolling becomes a way to repeatedly check how their own life measures up against other people's.

And that comparison can be exhausting.

When we start performing our lives

There can also be a subtle pressure to make our lives 'look' good.

A photograph isn't simply a photograph anymore.

It can become evidence.

• Look where I am.
• Look what I've achieved.
• Look how happy I am.
• Look at this wonderful life I'm living.

Sometimes we might even find ourselves thinking about whether something will make a good photograph while we're still experiencing it.

Have you ever been somewhere beautiful and found yourself thinking about the picture you need to take rather than actually looking around?

Or eaten something wonderful and immediately reached for your phone?

Or been enjoying a moment with someone and suddenly thought about how you could share it?

Again, there is nothing wrong with taking the photograph.

The question is whether the photograph has started to become more important than the experience itself.

What are we missing?

When our attention is constantly being pulled towards screens, notifications, other people's lives, and the next thing we need to see, we have less opportunity simply to be where we are.

And being present can feel surprisingly uncomfortable.

There is always something else we could check.

Something else we could watch.

Someone else we could compare ourselves with.

Something else we could be doing.

Perhaps that is why slowing down can sometimes feel difficult.

When we stop filling every moment, we might notice things we have been avoiding.

We might notice that we're tired.

That we're unhappy.

That we're lonely.

Or perhaps we might discover that we're actually okay.

Coming back to your own life

Perhaps this isn't about giving up social media.

It might simply be about becoming a little more conscious of 'how we are using it and how it makes us feel'.

You might notice:

• How do I feel after scrolling for twenty minutes?
• Am I enjoying this, or am I comparing?
• Am I looking at other people's lives because I genuinely want to, or because I'm avoiding something?
• Do I sometimes experience things through the thought of sharing them?
• When was the last time I did something simply because I enjoyed it, without photographing or documenting it?
• And perhaps, occasionally, we can put the phone down.

Not because social media is bad.

Not because we need to live a perfectly mindful life.

Just because our actual life is happening here.

Your life doesn't need an audience

Some of the most meaningful parts of our lives will never be photographed.

The conversation that nobody else hears.

The walk where we don't take a single picture.

The cup of tea we drink quietly.

The laughter that isn't recorded.

The ordinary Tuesday evening.

The moment when we sit beside somebody we love.

These things don't need to be shared to have value.

Your life doesn't need to look interesting to other people for it to be meaningful to you.

Perhaps sometimes the most important thing we can do is stop trying to capture the moment and simply **be in it**.

Because life isn't happening on our screens.

It's happening to us, right here.