Hacker News Reader

Comment by bradleyjg | Hacker News Reader

When someone posts a beautifully composed picture standing in front of a waterfall and the sunlight just so with the caption “I love spending time in the woods” I generally assume that she does not love spending time in the woods. The evidence rather suggests that she loves posing for and sharing photographs.

Likewise when someone writes a lot of long essays about how much he loves spending time in the woods and he can’t understand why no one goes hiking in the woods anymore I draw my conclusions from his actions, not words.

View on HN

> When someone posts a beautifully composed picture standing in front of a waterfall and the sunlight just so with the caption “I love spending time in the woods” I generally assume that she does not love spending time in the woods. The evidence rather suggests that she loves posing for and sharing photographs.

Could they... love both?

>Could they... love both?

I have yet to meet this unicorn.

I can see how it may be unlikely for a person posing for Instagram photos to be a person enjoying spending time in the woods. However I don't see why it would be unlikely for a person enjoying spending time in the woods to pose for photos.

Really? I enjoy spending time in the woods and also sharing photos on social media.

Congratulations on meeting me, I expect you to treasure this rare experience forever.

Right? I spend 4 days in the woods adventuring and exploring... How dare I take a few pictures along the way that only take a few minutes!

It’s 2022, the entire planet is online now. The “no girls here” meme is dead.

It seems wild to make assumptions about what other people love, based directly contrary to what they say they love.

Why do you feel justified in that?

And yet, the woods are teeming with hikers and campers, at least in California.

I often wonder whether the opportunity to stage your “life” in a beautiful place for social media is a part of why so many more people head into the woods than did ten or 20 years ago. I mean, the woods were there the whole time, and arguably the weather was better.

Sort of.

I encounter many miserable looking poorly equipped people constantly asking me to take selfies of them posing with a fake smile. I was stopped 7 times on a 50km hike recently.

People want to be seen to do it. They don’t appear to be enjoying it though.

Edit: ironically considering the article I tend to wear AirPods now because people don’t ask me to do it.

Pedantic nitpick that doesn’t diminish your point (you don’t like people doing photography and especially involving you in it, in the woods):

If they’re asking someone who is not themself to take a photo, the photo in question is, by definition, not a selfie.

One of my hobbies is outdoor photography. I don’t mind people taking actual photos of the outside. The objection is having 75% of the frame taken up by someone repetitively taking photos of the same pose (the good side of their face) while doing an impression of a fish and/or wearing something completely in appropriate that is going to land them in hospital one day from hypothermia.

As for the selfie, I’m on the fence on your semantic definition. I consider myself to be a meat flavoured selfie stick when asked. I’m merely a tool that happened to be walking past that is good for pointing their device at a bulbous ass obscuring the scenery.

I think the generally accepted meaning of "selfie" has drifted far enough into including "photos of my(self) taken with my phone at my request" that nitpicking about it has similarly drifted into the "WELL ACHURLY, literally doesn't mean that" school of prescriptivist nonsense.

That’s the first time I see “selfie” used in that sense. Even descriptively, I don’t think the word means that.

I am willing to allow language to shift.

But I have literally (in its original meaning!) never heard anyone but gw99 describe “pictures of myself taken by a bystander” as a selfie.

I’ve taken a lot of posed photos of tourists with their own cameras, I don’t see why “the camera is now a phone” would make that phenomenon merge with the specific thing people do with the front facing camera.

“Me, posed at destination” seems like a wholly distinct phenomenon to me.

> I have literally (in its original meaning!) never heard anyone

Well, the wandering nature of the word has been linguistically noted since at least 2014 by my knowledge[1]. Read more linguist blogs, I guess?

[1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11205

Fascinating! I wonder what subcultures of Americans use the word this way.

Driving to the woods is easier than twenty years ago.

Cars are better.

Roads are better.

And of course, maps are exponentially better. Not only in terms of directions. Discovery is exponentially better. That waterfall that only showed up on the USGS topo map, is now on the map in your pocket...and Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter.

And the Forest Service website.

I think the computer and information centric lifestyle we have now, and maybe efficient but stressful workplaces, they make it necessary (for some of us) to be very intentional about disconnecting. Hence going into the woods.

Never mind how much easier it is to not get lost in the woods thanks to GPS navigation on phones (even outside of service area, if you've had the sense to download the map). That said, you do run into people who head out relying on the phone who run into a hell of a time when it stops working, either due to battery or accidental disruption (ie, it fell in a river). It would be nice to see more folks pick up some basic orienteering skills (it's REALLY not all that hard...I learned in middle school), but either way, more folks getting an appreciation for outdoors I'd call a good thing.

Now, if they'd bring some Leave No Trace principles into the woods with them, that'd be great. Seeing how the eternal September played out on Usenet though, that may be a bit overly hopeful on my part.

> I often wonder whether the opportunity to stage your “life” in a beautiful place for social media is a part of why so many more people head into the woods

I think so. For me and my friends, we’re not “staging our life”, but a lot of times I’ll see someone post a photo of a trail on Instagram or Strava and I’ll comment asking where it is. We still went out 10 years ago. We still took photos 10 years ago. But now it’s SO much easier to share what the different trails look like and it’s possible to share the exact GPX tracks with each other.

It’s a wonderful time to be wandering around in the woods and if someone just got into the hobby yesterday and wants to post the beauty of their quarter mile “hike” more power to them.

I'm not sure exactly what you're arguing. Do you mean that writing about how you love spending time in the woods is evidence that you do not love spending time in woods? I guess John Muir's Wikipedia article needs a substantial rewrite, then.

Quite a few poets also need to re-examine their works. Robert Frost especially comes to mind.

My basic point is go do your thing. Enjoy it! I’m happy for you. Why does everyone need to convince me how great his thing is and that I should be out there doing it. The genre rings hollow and I suspect that the real enjoyable thing is trying to control other people.

If you don’t want to look on your phone, don’t look on your phone. Maybe other people will notice how happy you are. Or maybe they won’t.

> When someone posts a beautifully composed picture standing in front of a waterfall and the sunlight just so ... The evidence rather suggests that she loves posing for and sharing photographs

My last girlfriend was a great example of that. It was both confusing and infuriating because there was no way to know when she was being genuine about anything

May I ask if that was ever discussed or resolved? How did that end up working out?

A beautifully composed photo with the caption “Having an argument with my S.O., but relationships are worth it. #communication”

I think that can be inferred by the use of the word "last," meaning "previous" and "no longer" his girlfriend.

"My last girlfriend" suggests not a current girlfriend. Sounds like that's how it worked out.

I have learned that someone who excessively stands between an interesting subject and a camera rather than stands behind the camera should not be a part of my life. This includes my ex wife.

Instagram is also full of that. One of the cesspools of humanity.

However this appears to be roughly the usual “modern clipart” image selection for the headline image for the article.

This comment page seems to have a curious number of people who are projecting a bad experience with an ex-partner as emblematic of a broken society.

lots of people have been radicalized by narcissists, I suppose

That’s a fair assessment of the situation.

You’re probably right. Just seems like an unpleasant way to live. There’s assholes out there, but generally speaking I try to not let them live rent-free in my head.

I tend to agree but then again I have never been significantly harmed by this class of behavior

There's a meta effect where commiseration around narcissism and being a victim of it is its own form of self-indulgent thinking

People can like multiple things at once.

Not only can people like multiple things at once it is apparently incomprehensible to large swaths of Hacker News that people can like things that others do not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com