- Welcome back, everyone.
It's a great day here on YouTube.
Thanks for joining me.
Today, we're talking about something
that was inspired by a television commercial.
What do you know?
Maybe you've seen it yourself.
It's from HP, Hewlett-Packard, the computer company.
They show a bunch of stuff in the commercial
about the social media, texting virtual reality,
the Snapchat filters, the constant need
to be filming everything and the commercial asks,
"Is this real, is our life even real anymore?
"Come on, man."
Then it says, "Get real," and then it shows
a refrigerator with some pictures on it.
This commercial isn't just like a PSA,
they're trying to sell printers.
They like, "Don't have all digital stuff,
"print your photos and then put them on your refrigerator."
And it's a good point, having physical photos
can be a nice thing, but the commercial
actually made me think of a lot more things than just that.
I think the shot in the commercial
that intrigued me the most was the one
where you see a bunch of tourists
crowded around the Mona Lisa in the Louvre,
all with their phones out trying to get a picture.
And it's like, what is the point?
Why would you even do that?
This is not to judge you if you yourself
have taken a picture of the Mona Lisa
when you visited the Louvre,
but why, what's the point?
There are many professional photographs
taken of that picture in that very room
that are much better than anything you could get,
but it's this compulsion we have to be like,
"Ooh, this thing I see that's cool.
"Let me document it, something happened to me.
"Let me document it."
It's like, "I'm not even in the picture, but I saw it.
I was there, I can prove it, pics or it didn't happen."
This is a natural human thing.
I don't really think that technology
creates things within humans.
I think it just allows us to do the things
that we naturally want to do
and it makes it easier to do those things
and maybe let's us go too far, far too far
and when cameras first started coming around
and it was easy for your everyday person
to have a camera and take pictures,
it was sort of a good middle space
because people could document their lives.
They could take pictures at the birthday party.
They could pull out the old VHS camcorder.
That's right kids, if you wanted to take a video
back in the 80s you had to get this big bad boy out,
put a VHS tape in there and get some high-quality,
not HD video.
That's gonna be my new vlogging camera
once I get it fixed by the way,
I'm gonna go full hipster on you all.
But it's you were limited because it was all analog,
you had to have a tape, you had to have film
and sure, you could take a lot of pictures,
but you had to buy the film,
so there was like a cost associated
with the amount of documentation you wanted to make
and it was not technically the simplest thing to do
because you had to take the film out,
thread it and all that.
You had to be thinking about it, the film took up space.
Now that everything is digital,
now that we all have a camera and a camcorder
on this little thing that goes in our pockets
that can record better quality than anything
that we had 30 years ago, we just go crazy.
We take pictures of everything.
There's no stopping us because it's infinite.
I can take an infinite number of pictures, theoretically.
That's not a good thing when you mix
something you can do unlimitedly
with something that people like to do, they'll just do it
to an unhealthy degree.
Humans like to tell stories, right?
It's something that is inherent to being human.
I think it goes back to just like basic survival
when we had language, we could tell each other stories about
the hunt we went on and how it worked out,
what we did right, what we did wrong.
Stories are a way of living vicariously
through other people, through characters
and seeing what they did in their life
in this particular journey of the story.
How did they deal with it?
Did they do well, did they not do well?
What can I learn from it?
We love stories, we always wanna see 'em
and we like telling them also.
And pictures and video are a great way of telling stories.
So then we have social media on top of it,
which is a incredible way to broadcast all this stuff.
If we just had digital cameras, if we just had a phone,
but we didn't have a way to broadcast it to everyone,
maybe we wouldn't go so crazy,
but now that we can put everything on Facebook and Insta
and all that, we just go insane with it.
We're trying to tell the story of our lives constantly,
documenting every little single thing
to the point where it just goes from,
"I'm living my life and I'm occasionally
"documenting important things."
To, "I am living my life to document everything.
"I'm living my life to tell a story."
And ironically, at that point, you're not living life.
HP has a point, your life isn't that real at that point,
when it's just to get a good picture for social media,
get a good video,
I'm not even sure people realize they're doing it.
It turns into this anxiety, I think,
all the time that you're gonna have
even when you're not taking pictures.
Where it's like, "Should I get this on camera?"
I even feel that sometimes where it's like,
"Should I be filming this?
"Should I put this on YouTube?"
It's weird and I have to stop myself
and be like, "No, I want to actually live my life
"and have this experience for myself."
You see it all over the place like in that commercial
that HP put out, I mentioned the Mona Lisa thing,
everyone taking pictures of the Mona Lisa.
Why, why do it?
It's like when you go to a concert
and everyone's taking video and picture of the concert.
It's like, just watch the concert.
You paid to watch the concert.
How do you enjoy it more?
I'm getting flustered, you see.
But it's something to keep in mind, to ask yourself,
"Why am I doing this?
"Why do I have this itch that I have to scratch
"to document everything?"
I think maybe part of it is that life
is inherently ephemeral and there are these moments
where it's like, "I wanna capture this forever
"and I really can't."
And we're trying our best to, we're trying
to make moments last forever
and sometimes it can just be better to let go.
You just let go of that desire to grab onto it
and just live it and experience it.
It's like sometimes I'll see a sunset
that's really beautiful and I'm like,
"I wanna take a picture of this so I can show people
"how beautiful this was."
And first of all, I know that my camera
isn't gonna really capture it the way my eyes see it
'cause it's not a great camera
and I'm not a great photographer.
So there's no point, but then it's also like it's difficult
in a way to just let it go to be like,
"No, this is just a moment for me to see right now
"and no one else is around to share it with,
"so I just have to appreciate it now.
"The moment is ephemeral, it will be gone soon,
"but I'm sure another day,
"I'll see you another beautiful sunset."
It's a grounding thing to fight off that compulsion
to take a photo, to take a video,
to actually just live your life,
to have a real moment, to be fully present,
rather than become a performer
'cause as soon as you turn on the camera,
you become a model or performer, if you're in the video.
Or you become some kind of artist,
you're trying to frame up the shot,
so it can be preserved really well,
rather than just living as a human being in the moment.
Was HP trying to say that in the commercial, I don't know.
They probably say they were, but I don't think they were,
I think they were just trying to say buy my printer, son.
That's about it, that's all I've gotta say for today
and thank you for watching, I appreciate it.
Check out some other videos over here
and until next time.
Stay cool and attractive.