Habits

When I say we, I mean I.

Habits are not just hard to break, they are hard to identify. Habits are inevitable (obviously) but there are peculiar habits that arrive out of a necessity but then never diminish. Like when we see beauty we want to capture it. With a photograph, with a painting, with anything that is more lasting than our experience. And for what? So it can be shared. Mostly. We enhance our lives with music, with stories, with art. We capture it in bits. A moment becomes a picture, a quote…..a tweet. When you feel something you can't wholly understand, or precisely express - there's a song that'll do just that. And we encapsulate that moment in that song. While the song is supposed to be an expression of the reality, in the end what remains is the song. The moment doesn't stand independently anymore. It's a habit. To create information bites, whether it's through words, visuals or sounds. We produce bits, and more importantly we consume bits.  Quotes, extracted from their contexts, bolded and reproduced within pairs of bunny ear punctuation marks. It is a habit to want to enhance the experience. But the enhancement itself becomes the experience, and the reality is boiled down to representations. 

Our experiences become filtered and foreign. We participate in a culture of sharing, but once you share something it acquires a life of its own. It's not yours anymore, and it's not sacred. It becomes the object of someone else's analysis, based on the way they perceive things. Once the original context is removed, you most likely have diminished the beauty that you witnessed. The beauty that you wanted to capture. What you felt is no longer unedited. That feeling that allowed you to perceive something in a unique way is no longer present. And all that is left is that bit of information. Like a thought expressed in a blogpost.

When you are smoking a cigarette, you are inclined to finish it. Whether midway it loses its purpose, whether midway you no longer desire it - you finish it regardless. Sure it's a waste if you don't, but you are no longer smoking for the reason that you chose to smoke. You are smoking to finish it. Just like that, you are no longer capturing beauty to appreciate it, you are capturing it to contain it. 

It's dictatorial. It's consuming. Of course, nothing would be created if no one actualized their ideas. If thoughts were never put to paper there would be no production, no growth. But does it have to be so engrained? But, beauty is still as beautiful if you don't frame it, right? Without those encapsulating markers we forget to understand what we appreciate and what we don't. We forget how to differentiate between what is enchanting to us versus what we think should be enchanting. And realizing this is not enough to overcome it. But it maintains your sanity.