Stop externalising your life

Each to their own.

I enjoy seeing what my friends and family are up to, including the minutiae that might not otherwise come up in conversation. In participating, I also have an easy history of the things I've done to look back over. My wife loves TimeHop reminding her, via social updates, what she was doing on the same day a year ago. "Remember this?" Cue much reminiscing.

Further to that, all social sharing serves as developing a personal brand and there are social and commercial advantages to that whether all doing it realise or not.

"Paint a picture of it."

I almost laughed at this bit. Why not allow even more time for contemplative thought by first creating inks from scratch, using ingredients relevant to the original experience and naming each combination of colours to evoke just the right memories?

Personally, I agree. I know there are differing opinions but I don't care most of the time what my friends & family are up to in real-time. They'll tell me when I see them. I like to write about things I have done if I have some opinion of it, or if I'm proud of an achievement, but that's about it. People don't necessarily need to know what I'm doing right now if it's nothing particularly special or new.

Conversely, I don't need to necessarily need to know what they are doing all the time. But if they feel the need to share, fine. I just hope that if they read this post, by you, they might critically think about their current behaviour.

Yeah, kill the growth model for most "social" companies. The amount of noise is really counter-productive. I know one can just turn it off, but I don't want to live in society where most don't turn it off and focus on presenting life to others instead on life itself.

OP here. I definitely agree with you about social media being a good way of maintaining a record of what you've done. I often used to scroll down and down my FB wall for hours looking back at all the pictures and memories from my time at university.

I probably should have played this up more in the post, but my motivation for writing this came from having been on holiday and feeling a huge relief after I decided to stop constantly trying to document everything I was doing. I took just a handful of pictures, wrote about my day each evening on OhLife (great service if you haven't used it) and besides that just enjoyed the moment. When I compared this to what I see when my friends are on holiday ("At the top of the Empire State!!!1 #w00t #thuglyfe") I felt compelled to share my thoughts. To be clear, it's not a holier-than-thou attitude, I just think that people miss out on a lot when they concern themselves more with posting about their experiences than they do with enjoying them.

Not be demeaning, but there is an alternative way out of that - become a power user.

I frequently continue programming/typing, slip in an audio note to self or search the web via Google Now, while holding a normal conversation. And people with whom I interact got used to this to the level of requiring me to have the data from Wikipedia ready for the continuation of the discourse. :)

This is not a comment on the externalisation, but on how gadgetry, used properly, can add to experience.