Many decry the loss of “real time” to capturing moments on-screen, claiming that the recording of memories as they happen threatens to replace the actual memories you have of that moment. I’ve read many articles in which parents bemoan the fact their kids were seeing family vacations through GoPro cameras, rather than actually living them. After a day on the ski slopes, they edit their raw footage into action-packed greatest moments and post it to social media, where it’s shared and commented on by their friends, hyperextending their time on the mountain. For a generation raised on reality TV to be able to replay those moments over and over through a mediated interface is a way of reliving an eternal present, loved for a moment then replaced by the next day’s upload. In this way, we’re simultaneously archiving and forgetting: archiving because we continuously upload media, and forgetting because we rarely go back to visit what we have uploaded. Today’s upload is the best upload and keeps us very much present and mindful in the here and now.

So many aspects of our life have disappeared from movie screens [...] And they're now appearing on cable.

La vie sert à faire des opéras-comiques.

The social media maven spends his or her time creating a self-caricature, a much happier and more photogenic version of real life. People subtly start comparing themselves to other people’s highlight reels,

Life is not how people see it in movies or on social media. When one’s life is centred around social media, one may start to think that one has a problem. However, it shouldn’t be a do-or-die affair. One can aspire to be more than what one sees. Some people’s lives have been messed up because of social media. They have no understanding of reality again. They believe that living a fake life is is the real thing. They just follow people blindly, not knowing that nobody’s life is perfect.

There are so many different ways lives work out, so many stories, and every one of them is precious: full of joy and heartbreak, and a fair amount of situation comedy. Every life is a movie that starts in color. They just all end in black and white.

Someone says life is hard.
The comedian says, “Compared to what?”
Comedians are philosophers.