20211224 : photos and videos

This thought was triggered by a conversation I had with my wife. To be accurate, a conversation my wife had with me.

I had made a video - a sort of collage of photos for my daughter's birthday. It was a fun video.

However, making it took a while. Except for the last 3 years, I have a very very huge archive of photos. So I looked through every one of them over many many days, selecting and shortlisting them.

During all those days, It brought back memories of all those times all those years. The memories evoked all kinds of emotions - Joy, happiness, sadness, deep sense of loss, etc.

Dealing with those emotions and feelings took more time than seeing and shortlisting the photos.

We humans have evolved over millions of years. How and why are debatable, but the debate of millions of years has been put to rest.

It has been about 200 years since photography was invented and a little over a hundred years for the video. A couple of thousand years of getting portraits painted before that (although that can't be really counted - took days of posing. Nothing natural or candid).

Seeing something through someone else's eyes and experiencing that moment without being there ourselves was no less than a miracle.

It's a very very recent ability to be able to see something again in life. 

The past we experienced was left in the past earlier. Any amount we could bring up in emotions and feelings of the past was limited to what we could hold on to in our memories. 

Our memories are boundless and yet very limited. It probably helped us to move on faster from things.

How has this impacted our minds and emotions though? We probably have limited evolutionary design to cope with external memories - to support seeing things again, to revisit emotions and feelings over and over again

There are undoubtedly several advantages. Especially, being able to share a moment with another (like in my case - I don't get to experience anything if I don't see)

But can we handle it?

Or is it one more of the things we have done that is great on the face of it without understanding the full consequences?

It is good for the human in particular no doubt, but is it good for humanity in general.? 

I was seeing a series (by Will Smith - nature related by National geographic)

In one of the episodes, he covers sounds which we cannot hear from our ears but we can feel them. He struggles to discern it, but his companion, a blind person, is in his element with it. Our ability to sense by feeling has been diminished because of all the things we have around us. 

Many of it is natural evolution, but not everything.

Only recently, it was very common to remember several phone numbers.

Then the gadgets came.

Now we struggle remember even 1. If we remember our own number - it's great.

Our memory retention capacity got diminished by our own creation.

When we behold a great sight, we don't see it and absorb it. We mostly whip out our phone or camera.

If we didn't have photos/ videos, would we see better? Would we observe things better? Would we recall better?

What other faculties might we have evolved ourselves out of inadvertently...?