If you’re in a beautiful place or witness a beautiful moment, but you don’t have a phone with you to capture it in a photo or video, is the beauty wasted? In today’s technological world, it can feel that way. The convenient devices in our pockets have become so adept at capturing life’s highlight reel, that we start to live in ways that anticipate the mediation of the highs.

I can still remember a time (in my lifetime!) when buying a postcard of a beautiful scene, and sending it via snail mail to loved ones (often taking weeks) was one of the only ways you could relay to others the beauty you were experiencing somewhere in the world. Now we just grab our phone, record something, and post about it in real time via social media “stories” to mass audiences.

I suspect the clunkiness and slowness of the “old way” allowed us to be present with experiences more than we are in the “insta” world of today. Yes, it’s convenient and fun to share quick visual updates with masses of friends, family, and acquaintances—and follow the posts of others. It’s not all bad. But I wonder if the constant temptation to mediate our experiences of beauty might tend to mute the thrill of experiencing it. I sense we are less awestruck, silent, and dumbfounded before beauty in the social media age. Instead, our thoughts in the face of beauty quickly turn to questions like: What kind of public post could this turn into? How will this image or video fit into a future Instagram Reel or TikTok post?

I explore these dynamics in the article featured below. Partly preaching to myself as I embark on a nature-centric family vacation later this summer, I write this with hope that we might become people “so engrossed in the beauty of a sunset, a waterfall, or a coastal tide pool that we forget to take a picture of it.”