If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If I met Timothée Chalamet in Bushwick and didn’t post a selfie of us on Instagram, did I even meet him? Pics or it didn’t happen.
At the heart of these questions lies the same trepidation: Whether experience exists without witness.
Galileo Galilei says, “Tastes, odors, colours, and so on […] reside only in consciousness. If the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.”
On consciousness, Immanuel Kant says, “I have no knowledge of myself as I am but only as I appear to myself.” Is consciousness starting to predominantly exist in the digital world? Did I even go on a run if I didn’t make a Strava post about those 10 kilometres?
Ocean Vuong writes, “I touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who I was. Can you hear me yet? Can you read me?”
By nature, experience is fleeting. We are not meant to remember each and every moment perfectly, but the desire to commemorate endlessly is encapsulating. Now that it is possible to capture, track, log every event on the internet, to do so has become almost addictive.
Unlike a scrapbook, documenting our lives on social media inherently invites feedback from those around us—the validation that what we did was cool, fun, appealing. The innate desire to remember our lives has rotted into the desire to be remembered for these events. Music, movies, experiences, hobbies all become intertwined with identity itself: A friend once told me, “My Instagram is my whole identity.”
In an attempt to immortalize human experience, digital tracking has transformed how we understand our experiences. As a society, we are moving towards a Black Mirror-esque lifestyle where the concept of 24/7 recordings through our eyes is not totally unfathomable. By making ourselves overly digitally accessible, we are losing the essence of real human interaction. Spending a concert recording it, to post with a tastefully placed emoji later, strips you of the experience of closing your eyes, throwing your hands in the air, and truly feeling the music with a bunch of strangers who all have at least this one thing in common. The authentic human experience is being boxed into a digital consciousness that ceases to exist beyond the online realm. After all, it really is that damn phone.
Instead of keeping track of every like and dislike, logging every book, movie, or running trail, we need to start leaving our day-to-day lives up to the imagination of those around us—no more Spotify Wrapped or Goodreads reading challenge.
Jean Baudrillard skillfully warns, “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning”—a condition reflected in our compulsive need to document rather than experience.
Between ChatGPT and Instagram feeds and hours of doomscrolling on TikTok, it is easy to fall victim to the endless information at our fingertips. In a time where anything and everything is accessible with one Google search, find solace and meaning in disallowing yourself to float into the infiniteness of digital consciousness. Do not let your human experience exist solely in the ripples of social media. Live with intention and lean into the analog life.
