People aren’t actually obsessed with their phones. If they were they’d get one without putting most of their attention on how good the camera is. A phone’ll cost you $99 tops, a camera $300+, what are you carrying?
When you pull it out at concerts and car crashes to snap a couple, when you meet your idols and your first thought is to ask for a pic, when you’re in presence of good food and great views and your first thought is to capture rather than to breathe fumes, and when you can’t go anywhere without it, you’ve got to realize that your phone doesn’t take pictures, your camera sometimes makes calls.
Everyone’s a photographer – that photographer, subconsciously aware that something actually interesting happening in their life is a rarity, that can only be captured only if they’re always prepared, only.
And so we carry these cameras that make calls, text-gossip to pass the time, and when something interesting finally happens… bliss. We finally have something to prove that our daily life isn’t actually all that boring – like, scroll through these new pics like.
But it is. People with interesting lives don’t have that much time to take pictures or answer texts, interesting shit is happening. The universal sign of enjoying a good night out is not being able to get to your phone, the secret’s to put the camera down as well. To stop being boring. Interesting lives have interesting people. Everyone’s a photograph, image-conscious, how’s that interesting? Put the camera down. What were you like before the camera?
There’s that old story of Native-American, African, and Aboriginal tribes believing that a photo can steal your soul, cage it. Seems foolish in these dangerous times, but what were you like before you learnt how to take a good pic? Of yourself, of your life.
Bob Dylan has that line, “But you’ve picked up quite a story and you’ve changed since the womb. What happened to the real you, you’ve been captured but by whom?” It means a lot of things, one of them being that we are our worst enemies.