“If you didn’t click it, it didn’t happen"

By Soumya Rastogi, TYBMS

With our phones glued to our hands, every smile, laugh, twinkle in our eyes is within reach. What we used to click to remember, we now click to prove. To others, yes — but more dangerously, to ourselves.

If you queued two hours outside Santa Maria in Bandra on its last day, with the aroma of fresh bread wafting through the air, raindrops patterning your umbrella, a conversation with your friend that will stay with you forever, and bit into the famous sandwich, but didn’t take a photo, shoot a reel, or drop a story, did you even go? Chasing the perfect shot, do we miss the emotion behind it? Why is the urge to show so much stronger than the urge to feel?

Staged candids — an oxymoron of our era. My “9 to 5” grind through a lens, are you recording your day or planning your day to record? Forget the others; maybe you’re one of those with a deactivated Instagram, or just don’t care for posting, is your gallery overflowing too? Or have you found the balance?

When someone asks, “What did you do last weekend?” I grab my phone, because if I did something, I must’ve clicked it. But what about the days when my gallery is empty? Did I do nothing worth remembering, or did I forget because there’s no proof?

Photography has shifted, from stopping a moment in time to proving that it was a moment worth living.

Susan Sontag saw this coming long before Instagram. In her book On Photography, she wrote that “a photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened”(Sontag, 1977, p. 4). Proof, not memory. That line echoes louder today than ever. We no longer click to hold on to a fleeting smile, we click to certify that it existed. As she put it, “today everything exists to end in a photograph” (Sontag, 1977, p. 4). It’s almost prophetic: our moments don’t just unfold, they are staged, curated, performed, until the lens confirms their worth. And that need for proof, that urge to show, is where the real problem begins.

I was fortunate enough to be one of those who attended a Coldplay concert. A sky full of stars, just one song where the band requested a stadium of 50,000 fans to put down their phones, lift their hands, and just be part of this united experience. Yet the next morning, my feed was full of that same song. Stories, reels, photographs — captured through a hundred different lenses.

(my favourite photo from my coldplay concert, with my best friend)

Why couldn’t people put their cameras down? Was that video truly something they needed to keep, or was it just reflex, the muscle memory of reaching for the phone?

Personally, I believe by putting my phone down, I was part of the bigger picture, a sacred moment frozen in time that will replay in my mind regardless. I also have friends who tell me it was totally worth it to take that one video.

Has our happiness inadvertently linked to our ability to record?

And then there’s another emotion of our era: FOMO. People deactivated their accounts during the Coldplay craze, and articles about the gig economy flooded my feed. The moment you had those tickets, you belonged. The Marriott sold out at ₹88,000 a night - for rooms that usually cost ₹10,000. People traveled to Ahmedabad from Mumbai when they couldn’t get DY Patil tickets, spending more on flights and hotels than on the show itself. That’s the power of belonging, the price of saying I was there, of proving your place in the story, even if the memory itself gets buried under the receipts.

Have you ever walked into Trident, gone straight to the washroom, snapped a mirror selfie, and left? It’s fun for sure, but does the absence of a photo make the moment feel less real? I’ll admit I’ve reposted a friend’s story when I wasn’t even at the party. Sometimes I wonder if I’m trying to plant a memory I didn’t make.

Sociologist Erving Goffman once said that life is like a stage, and all of us are performers playing to an audience. What we share is the front stage, the polished version, the staged candid, the mirror selfie. The messy parts, the back stage, stay hidden: the awkward silences, the tears, the nights that felt flat (Goffman, 1956). Social media only turns up the spotlight, making every post a kind of performance.

Performance of joy. That’s what so much of this feels like — not just living the moment, but staging it, rehearsing it, playing it back for an invisible audience. If all my friends think I’m happy, then maybe, just maybe, I start to believe it too. A carefully cropped frame, a caption with just the right mix of casual and curated, and suddenly happiness isn’t what I feel but what I can convince others I felt (Goffman, 1956). Fake it till you make it- but at what point do you stop faking, and at what point do you stop making?

Trips these days aren’t complete without a recap reel. Three days of memories encapsulated into thirty seconds, highlighting the “most important” ones. You don’t just travel anymore — you storyboard. Every sunrise, every café visit, every laugh with your friends is weighed against the thought: will this make the cut? The reel becomes the memory, not the other way around. Who decides what's most important? Good lighting, perfect angles, or the ones recorded with a 50-megapixel camera, or the messy moments that never made it into the edit?

The water is flowing upstream. Clips chosen for the aesthetics become the memories we preserve, drowning those that escaped your gallery in a sea of forgotten moments.

Experience is the new currency. Instead of saving and investing, people spend on memories. Instead of materialism, you chase experiences. But can there be too many memories? Are all experiences rich, or only the expensive ones?

("The Purpose of Life is to Experience" Pinterest)

Looking back, it’s clear why experiences have become our new wealth. Whether it was a late-night chat with a sibling in another time zone, a small Monopoly game with friends, or a spontaneous trip to a theme park, these moments shaped my days more than any material possession ever could. They filled the empty spaces in routines, gave stories to tell, and memories to revisit. Experiences aren’t just things we do, they are the currency with which we invest in ourselves, in connection, and in the life we remember.

And yet, the way we collect these experiences changed almost overnight. Since 2019, time seems to have moved at lightning speed. Covid pushed digitization forward at a pace no one expected, making photos and videos the default ledger of our lives. I was in 10th grade when it hit. They say time flies when you’re stuck in a routine, trapped in mundanity, but my gallery tells a different story. Days blurred together. The more I tried to remember, the more I forgot. Screens became the bridge to family and friends; distance played a role too- friends went to colleges in different cities, siblings in different time zones. The only trace left was a Snapchat streak, a gallery full of moments that were captured but not fully lived.

Sociologist David Harvey once called this time–space compression, the way technology collapses distance and speeds up life until everything feels both immediate and indistinguishable (Harvey, 1989). Covid only amplified it. With every interaction happening through screens, time no longer stretched but folded in on itself. A semester of online classes felt like a week. A year indoors felt like a blur. The faster the world connected, the harder it became to separate one day from another.

Almost at the end of my undergrad, I can’t believe how fast the last five years have gone by. Personally, I can’t remember them clearly. Experiences feel special when they’re rare, spontaneous, and unique. But when spontaneity becomes routine, when the extraordinary becomes ordinary, what counts as special? When everything is special, nothing stands out. And when experiences blend together, do we start clicking compulsively just to reassure ourselves that all of them were different?

If your gallery is the only place your memories live, what does that say about the way you lived them?

Let’s look at it from another lens. If experiences are the new currency, why does it feel like we only spend them on joy? Every concert, every sunset, every toast with friends — clicked, filtered, and shared. Yet when the weight of silence presses down, when the tears come without warning, the camera stays untouched. What do we reach for then? Not our phones, but the old journal hidden in a drawer, the locked Notes app, or even the margins of a forgotten notebook.

Swiping through my gallery is like replaying paradise, each photo a fragment of joy stitched together. Flipping through my journal, though, is like opening a storm cellar, the pages heavy with gloom, anger, and words I couldn’t say out loud. The split feels stark. Happiness is performed for the lens; sorrow is tucked away in private spaces, almost ashamed of itself. Why is it so easy to showcase highs, yet so instinctive to hide lows?

Perhaps because sadness is harder to aestheticize. A smile fits neatly into a frame. Grief doesn’t. Try posting a picture of loneliness—it never looks as clean, never gathers the same likes. So we bury it. We let our cameras hold the light, and our journals hold the dark.

What Goffman reminds us, though, is that even silence can be part of the performance(Goffman, 1956). The journal isn’t just private, it’s backstage rehearsal, where emotions are processed away from the audience. Onstage, we curate smiles; offstage, we script our grief in writing, away from the lens. The divide isn’t about joy versus sorrow as much as it is about what we believe belongs in public view and what must remain hidden.

Maybe that’s the paradox of our digital lives. We measure joy in clicks and views, but we measure sorrow in the number of words we can spill before our hand cramps. Both are proof. Both are memory. But only one is public. The other stays hidden, waiting in silence, waiting to be revisited in the dim light of another heavy day.

I realize now: I click when I’m happy, and I write when I’m sad. Photos freeze the moments I want to remember; words absorb the ones I want to survive. Maybe you do the same, dividing your life between the gallery you show and the pages you keep hidden. 

Or have you discovered a way to let the camera catch your storms?

Maybe it’s time to rethink the way we use the camera. From proving to reminiscing — that’s the shift. A phone doesn’t have to be a trap; it can be a tool. One intentional click can capture the memory, and then you can put it down and live the moment.

I remember a trip where I went a little overboard: a hundred photos, multiple angles of every sunset, every meal, every street corner. By the time I returned home, I barely remembered the feeling of walking those streets. Contrast that with a different trip, where I took just three photos — three frames that mattered. Every other second, I was present: laughing, wandering, watching, breathing. Those three images now hold a world of memory, while the hundred are just files in a folder.

Even at the Coldplay concert, the lesson was the same. The band asked 50,000 people to put their phones down for one song, and I did. I can still hear the guitars, the roar of the crowd, the warmth of my friend’s hand brushing against mine. Those who filmed every second may have video proof, but I have the memory. The camera is not the enemy, it’s the way we let it guide us.

Looking back, sociology gives us a lens to understand why we click compulsively and curate every experience. Erving Goffman reminds us that life is a stage, and social media has turned up the lights on our front stage. Our smiles, our trips, even our quiet celebrations are performed for an audience — carefully framed, rehearsed, and polished. Behind the scenes, the back stage remains private: our doubts, our sadness, the ordinary moments that are too real to post. Susan Sontag, meanwhile, shows how photography itself shapes our perception of life. She argued that to photograph is to “appropriate” a moment, turning experience into proof, into something consumable, almost detachable from the lived feeling. The image becomes a claim: I was here. I belonged. I was happy. And David Harvey’s idea of time–space compression explains why this need feels urgent: with digitization collapsing distances and accelerating life, days blur together, weeks fold into months, and memories overlap. The faster the world moves, the more we feel we need to capture, curate, and certify every moment. Taken together, these lessons offer a guide: the camera isn’t the enemy, it’s our relationship with it. Awareness of performance, recognition of the lens’s power, and understanding the speed at which life unfolds can help us reclaim presence. When we notice the staging, the appropriation, and the compression, we can begin to live intentionally, using photography to anchor our experiences rather than define them. 

Intentional clicking is the mantra: one photo, then live the moment.

Simplicity is key. You’ll find your stories in the little things: “I didn’t know how to cook, so my job was to wash utensils.” Or that drive at midnight to a hill station, the one that didn’t make it into a reel. These are the moments you’ll remember, the mundanity that becomes extraordinary because it’s yours.

So now, don’t chase experiences — live them. When spontaneous experiences become the new normal, where does the mundane go? When you’re overwhelmed with emotions and memories, what if you forget them all? That’s why living fully, even in the quiet, is essential. The camera should serve as a companion, not a cage.

Balance is simple: notice, breathe, participate. Click a photo if it matters - one frame that will bring back the feeling later - but don’t let the lens replace the experience. Make memories first, then use the camera as a tool to anchor them, not as proof to show the world.

Think of it as a question you ask yourself at the end of every day: What do I want my gallery to show me? Proof I was there? Or proof I was alive in that moment? The answer is yours alone. And it’s the small, unplanned, and often unrecorded moments, the laughter over burnt toast, the long silence in a car ride, the unexpected detour to a hill station, that will live longest in your memory.

Photography is a privilege, not an obligation. Presence is the only currency that truly matters. So take your shots, write your notes, record your videos — but remember to step away from the frame. Step into life. Experience it. Let it imprint itself on you in ways no gallery ever could.

References-

Goffman, E. (1956). The presentation of self in everyday life. University of Edinburgh, Social Sciences Research Centre.

Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Blackwell.

Sontag, S. (1977). On photography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Illustration- 

(A snapshot from the new Superman movie, 2025 where Lex Luther’s girlfriend, despite being with the world’s most powerful man, watching him build alternate dimensions and send countries to war with each other, she’s more interested in taking pictures for her Instagram)