The Vain Cycle Of Vanity...

Me stuck in the trunk of my car is much more interesting than me taking a picture of my own face.

The farther we go through time, the more we all seem to put a higher value upon our own self importance.  I hate this.

I want to feel old, so allow me to put a time stamp on myself for a moment and say that when I was in high school, the first mass-market camera phone came out and I believe I was a junior at the time.  A sophomore guy in my Latin class was given one of these phones by his parents for his birthday and we all thought it was the most awesome advancement ever because it could capture and store about ten incredibly grainy pictures.  Text them?  Oh, hell no, you stuck a cable into the phone and transferred them to your computer.  Actually, at the time, my cell phone did not even have a color screen and I had a text message plan that allowed me to either send or receive twenty messages each month.  

Now?

Now we want to capture and distribute images of everything.
Even our own faces.

I am a self-admitted selfie hater and I will probably stand by that until I die.  A few years ago I said the same thing about Twitter, but my Google advisor told me I needed one for this blog you are reading, so @JDrewSilvers at your service. Coming back to selfies and most other pictures you find on social media, self importance is becoming more and more rampant.  Going anywhere without being in the background of someone else's Facebook photo album is more difficult than I ever would have imagined it to be, because for some reason everyone wants to capture every moment they live, specifically their own head, but for what exactly?

Let me set something up for you...

I am sitting in my car, about to pull out of my driveway and decide something:

"You know what?  I am going to stretch my arm back a little, angle my head, hold my iPhone out in front of the steering wheel and take a picture of myself."

*Snap*

"No!  That wasn't good enough!"

*Five snaps later*

"Damn, I look good."

Then I upload the best picture of the lot to every social media outlet because...

Yeah, I have no idea why I would do that because I cannot bring myself to understand why this is even a thing people do.  And in less than a week's time, they will do the same thing all over again.  My opinion behind this has nothing to do with my self confidence, because I actually have more than enough of that, but my self importance and standard of personal vanity are apparently pretty low, which I see nothing wrong with.  I do wonder if people take so many selfies because they are in search of some sort of confidence reassurance or if it is because they have so much confidence that they crave an ego boost to exacerbate it even more.

Maybe I am stupid or just stuck in a more simple mindset than most, but I liked things a little better before we started plastering pictures of our faces all over the internet as a means to seek attention.  Vanity is not my thing, but so many others seem to cling to the idea.  I do like photography, but I like it more when the focus is candid and people are caught in a moment of living something of importance or just their daily lives with a method and motive behind what they are doing rather than the only motive being "Look at me!  This is my face.  It looks just like it did two days ago."

Bring on the hate.  I am ready for it...

Grace and Peace,
-Drew

 -Add me.  Stalk me.  Tweet me.  I really don't mind.-
Personal Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/drew.silvers
Blog Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/drewcoustic
Email:  drewcoustic@gmail.com
Twitter:  @JDrewSilvers
Instagram:  http://www.instagram.com/jdrewsilvers