You don't need to document everything

I would consider this from the opposite stance: why are we looking? The article is a rant against a pathology and I agree with it, I do believe there’s a positive aspect too. Perhaps we just see the annoying consequences when we’re in the real world.

When I see a bunch of kids at a table in a restaurant yes, they have their phones out, but the way it looks to me is their convo diffusely and casually involves more than the five or six people at the table (“hey look Joe has a broken arm!” “It’s Judy’s birthday during the week so we had the restaurant bring her a special dessert and she’s embarrassed” “Hey Joe, Alice broke the same arm, look!”). More messaging than posting, and part of the dinner, not supplanting it. Mostly the kids are talking with each other. I think that’s great. (Note, in my case kids 16-25).

I get the feeling that these interactions don’t increase Dunbar’s number but make the links slightly deeper.

The influencers and social media posting are, IMHO, froth that will subside.

Personally I don’t do a lot of social media and would do almost none if my partner weren’t annoyed that I wasn’t up to date with what is happening with some friends. I do post a bit on FB (guess my age!) but only when something non routine happens. But I do value FB because it helps me catch up / stay up to date with what my friends and their kids are doing, all around the world. A friend lost her husband and it wasn’t an extreme event like the awful ones described in the article, just her blowing off a bit of steam (and grief) as his illness proceeded. Healthy for her and you know, good for those of us who loosely interacted along the way.

I like storing photos on Facebook so it will remind of the memory on later years on the same day. It’s nice and many times I’ve completely forgotten the event until I see the reminder and photo. It’s gotten to the point where I’ll post photos and restrict access to only me.

I also think experiencing things and being there is important but it’s hard to know everyone’s motivations and this piece seems to assume everyone is like the author.

Human memory is fickle and things I thought I would always remember, I forget. So having photos and notes are important to spark memories and improve my well-being, at least for me.

I think oversharing is an actual societal issue, people spend lots of energy trying to create an outwardly perfect narrative to share with friends, family and random strangers.

It's just so much mental energy to do so, and it harms (in the most vague use of this word) others, because they too think their life must be just as perfect as well.

Every time I stand in some photoesque place, I think "there are probably already thousands of photos better staged than mine will ever be."

I end up only taking photos of things like a spectacularly nice knot on a rope, the fire escape plan (hotel layout), what I had for dinner, or other stuff that'll be difficult to find online. Though I rarely look back at those, a strong motivator is regret minimzation, since I'll probably only visit once.

I can only speculate what the world will be like in a hundred years, when all corners of Earth have been photographed, and on constant display. I'm sure the tourism industry has to be... shrunk... anyway, for multiple reasons: at least 1) unnecessary energy usage and (2) global invasive mixing of ecosystems way too fast for them to handle it gracefully. A sea of photographies will make that easier.

I absolutely love this take! My personal quirk is to be "phone free": I don't carry a cellphone. I have one, but it stays at home, plugged in. I only take it with me if I have to take a flight. On most days I only carry a Moaan ebook reader (the size of a phone) or a Bigme (the size of a tablet).

No phone is nice for concentration (reading a book), but the lack of distraction goes both ways: no notifications/email or apps to waste my time, and also no possibility to take a picture to waste my consciousness of what's happening!

I think the lack of pictures make me experience the moment more, with my eyes: I can always check the pictures other people will have taken on their feeds, later. For something like a new year countdown, there'll be multiple versions available.

Older generations get swept up in this need to document everything too. My mom, for example, recorded me sobbing and holding my dog as she was being put down last year.

I think I've commented this before, but Bo Burnham:

"I was sort of raised in America when it was a cult of self-expression, and I was just taught, you know: express myself and have things to say and everyone will care about them. And I think everyone was taught that, and most of us found out that no one gives a shit what we think...They say it’s the ‘me’ generation. It’s not. The arrogance is taught or it was cultivated.

It’s self-conscious. That’s what it is, it’s conscious of self. Social media is just the market’s answer to a generation that demanded to perform, so the market said “Here, perform everything, to each other, all the time for no other reason.” It’s prison, it’s horrific. It’s performer and audience melded together.

What do we want more than to lie in bed at the end of the day and just watch our lives as a satisfied audience member? I know very little about anything, but I do know this: that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it"

I agree that we should experience things. Sometimes I take one photo to remind me of the event and then I put my phone away

Few notes:

- I do tend to document much BUT not to publish my personal docs to the world, so well, I'm not selling much for free;

- while I tend to document I find a curious issues, maybe mine, maybe common: on one side I fail to proper document anything: I start baldly to document something but quickly decline and fail completing the docs, integrate it with the others and properly keep anything up to date, conversely while I have even too much text written on various stuff I fail to have something like a simple "my home siteguide for my family", subtitle: "If/when incapacitated my dear you can find here all infos too keep the home up and running";

- for literate programming personal stuff it's the same: I tend to start in org-mode with much prose and an outline of anything, but many times I end up abandoning the literate approach to write code directly that a certain point in time I go back splitting the now working and complete enough code in the original org-mode structure, who generally get revised a bit. Than a plateau until something break and the game restart.

Long story short:

- documenting does not means showing anything to anyone on a personal website, it can perfectly be just for few people in private;

- documenting and keeping thin up to date probably demand a not so common discipline and maybe that's why in most places there are a more or less big pile of document crap and little usable, up to date and easy to use documentation.

I've been wishing I had better documentation of earlier experiences and have started building a personal store for this. Sort of like an external memory palace since I can't seem to make my meat brain comply. Sometimes I just need a pointer to that memory to retrieve them and these pictures and documents help. Need? No. Will it make me happy? Maybe not. Interesting? I think so.

While this problem is growing for younger people, there are still many many many people who live reasonable non-scoial-media-driven lives. You probably just won't hear about them because...they don't promote themselves on social media. Social media both purposefully by the companies, but also by the nature of the content, depicts a world where everyone is on it. Everyone is doing this new trend, or is aware of this new meme, or has heard about this drama. It's toxic, it gives you FOMO to even think about stopping. It's messed up. It's sad to see it in my friends and family.

Documenting one’s life so the digital forensics people have something to look at…sign of the times…

Meh.

It happened once, and then I bought a little tripod mount thing and now I get my video and get to watch. Problem solved.

Granted, HN is the only “social” media I have.

She says nothing about requirements and test cases.

Here I thought it would be an opinion piece on how code doesn’t need documentation.

Quite the "get off my lawn" moment the author is having here.