the wild, dirty, messy, sometimes ugly person you are when you’re just being you. There’s the side people see out with you. Everyone lives a double life: the one you see and the one you stalk. We have our social selves and then our social media. You care about what you’re doing now rather than thinking how you’ll look later Yes, maybe you can’t remember it clearly now, can’t see it for a reminder or add the photo to your friend's slideshow, but you can still feel it. They’re the moments you didn’t stop to take a picture, making your friends turn around or judging the aesthetic rather than appreciating it. It’s the time you actually danced to the music rather than stood there filming. It's the moments you didn’t stop to take out your phone or Go Pro. They're the pictures, videos and tweets that take us out of the moment and prevent the memory from every really forming.Īccording to a study reported in Daily Mail, at peak times, the average person checks his device around nine times an hour. Checking it almost every six seconds during evening hours, some people unlock their phones over 900 times over an 18-hour period. Only ones where you’ve stopped being part of the moment and instead become part of a memory it became a stolen shot. There is no such thing as the captured moment, only a frozen one. The moments you can’t run through on your Facebook feed are the ones you want to keep with you. You're in the moment rather than behind a screen They are the ones that we lived, experienced and refused to take a second away to try and store for later. They are the ones we can’t really remember, can’t sift through our iCloud or send to friends. The best memories we hold, the ones that will stay with us for the rest of our lives and relieve us in our darkest moments are not ones we can recall through a photograph or relive through a video. That's why those moments we're not recalling through a photograph or scrolling past on Facebook are the ones we remember the best. That's 500 million pictures of experiences we're not really having. That 500 million times throughout the day that we took ourselves out of the moment and refused to live in it. That's 500 million times people stopped having an experience to document one. That's 150 times out of a small window of 24 hours that you missed a moment.Īccording to the data, compiled and presented by analyst Mary Meeker, more than 500 million photos are shared every day, with that figure expected to double in the next year. It's 150 times we refused to be part of the moment, and removed ourselves to digitize it. That's 150 times we stopped looking around and just looked down. That's what makes these moments so special, because moments that haven't been digitized and missed because of some technology, are rare.Īccording to the annual Internet trends report distributed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’s, we're on our phones an average of 150 times throughout the day. You remember the love you had for each other, and that love comes back. You can’t see the time or the place, but you remember the laughter and the fun you were having. It’s something just you and your friends can try to recall, only when you're together, bringing it up and revisiting those feelings all over again.

There’s just you and the vague recollection of a great time. They are memories that weren’t published or clicked on. You can’t soar back to it with a simple glance of a photo or Facebook link to a video you’re praying to God you’re not in. There are no photos, videos or digitized tokens from that night. Those emotions still come rushing back, filling your body, even if the images don’t. You will live 20 years and still feel the weight of them. You remember those feelings the way you remember a birth or a wedding. You see moments, flashing and fleeting, and faces of people you once loved, now love or still love. You revert to the time and the place, letting it settle in your mind, letting the feelings of that night flood over you. Those long days that turned into nights, strolling through parks, cities and just feeling so damn happy to be alive. I’m talking about those nights you shared with your best friends, or your family or those friends who became family while abroad. This all-consuming adoration you had for your friends, your life and that very moment you can hardly remember. That feeling of happiness, a contentment you hadn’t felt in a while. That one you can’t remember anything about, yet you can still feel everything? The night you can really only remember by feelings you had during it?

Remember that night