SDS 338: Too Many Photos

Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast everybody. Super excited to have you on the show. Today we’ve got a quick FiveMinuteFriday episode and I wanted to share an observation with you that I was pondering recently. So I’ve noticed a lot of the time people take a lot of photos, myself included. Sometimes I take just unbearably huge number of photos for my level of tolerance to spending time taking pictures of the world around. I noticed a lot like I’ve done this before myself where I take photos of food right? And people, I notice people that do it quite a lot, almost every single time. And what I wanted, what I found interesting about all of this is that we get so caught up in the moment of taking the photo, in the activity of taking photo, we miss the moment of life that we are supposed to be living, that we’re supposed to be remembering, we want to be kind of remembering, we want to be sharing.

And so there’s a few sides of the coin here. Not even just two. So on one hand, yes, we want to keep the memory and that’s fantastic, that’s great. But how many photos do you think there are in the world? Well, conservative estimates say that every single year humans take about 1, at least 1 trillion photos per year. So if you take an estimate that about a billion people, at least a billion people have cameras or phones with cameras on them. And they take at least about approximately three photos per day, which is a very conservative average estimate. There are people who take probably a hundred photos per day. And you multiply that over the course of the year, you get about a trillion. So in reality, we passed the trillion mark in about 2015 now I would estimate we are sitting at 1.5 or even higher, 1.5 trillion photos per year.

And that’s again a conservative estimate. So what happens to all these photos? Well, some of them get uploaded, some of them get views, some of them get shared. But it’s physically impossible for us to be viewing and reminiscing or reliving these, all these moments. Most of these photos from my personal experience, about 90% of them never get looked at again. Or maybe at most get looked at once. This is a good exercise actually, just go through your album and see how many photos you actually look at and you’ve looked at, in the past that you’ve taken before. Most of them get never get looked at and unfortunately, so the other side of the coin is that, unfortunately we miss that moment when we are living life in order to sacrifice that, sacrifice living experience in order to take the photo.

So what I’ve been doing recently is I… Actually, it’s funny, my camera on my phone broke about two months ago and I wasn’t in a rush to fix it at all. Every time I went to the Apple store and just so happened they would say, “Well you got to wait two hours before it gets repaired” and, or you know, “You got to sign up in advance”. Eventually, I did get it fixed like a few weeks ago, but for those, for that month or two months that my camera wasn’t working, it was really, really cool. Like I just physically couldn’t take photos with my front camera I could with my back camera, but like the one that’s facing me. But I don’t use it that much. And so in that sense, like it was very liberating to have this experience as once my camera got fixed and my phone, I didn’t like even start to take these photos again. It wasn’t as natural and it just felt like it’s detracting from my experience of life.

So my call to you this weekend would be try to live these two days. If you’re listening to this on Friday, great. Even if it’s on any kind of day, you’re listening to try to live the next two days, not including today, but the next two days without taking a single photo. See how you feel. Like even if you’re super tempted, if you’re super tempted like “Oh, this moment I got to share it with others. This is like once in a lifetime opportunity.” I’m going to like give you a spoiler alert. Most likely it’s not a once in a lifetime opportunity and most likely people can just go and Google that same phenomenon that you’re taking a photo of, whether it’s a butterfly or a waterfall, whatever it is, and they can Google it and they can find a better photo by national geographic or something like that.

So don’t worry about others missing out on seeing this amazing life that you’re seeing. Just delve, jump into, dive into seeing it for yourself. Try live the next two days and see how you feel. Just consciously don’t allow yourself to take a single photo. And the more frustrated you get with this exercise, the better. That means you’re actually coming back to reality. And yeah, see how you feel at the end. I personally really loved that experience of not having a camera for like a month or two. I don’t remember how long it was. And I’m planning on continuing that.

So on that note, good luck with this challenge if you choose to take it on. And I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, happy analyzing.