Somewhere Along the Way
Lately I’ve been thinking about what it means to shoot.
Not to point a lens or press a button, but to observe — to hold attention still long enough for something to reveal itself. Somewhere along the way, exposure began to pass for expression. Everyone shoots, everyone posts, and yet very little is actually seen. The act that once required patience and awareness has been consumed by immediacy. Observation, the quiet core of image-making, has been replaced by reaction.
And it’s not just about photography. The same drift has reached how we speak, how we publish, how we exist online. We narrate our activity as if the act of doing were already meaning enough. The feed becomes a mirror — one we check not to look, but to be seen. The problem isn’t technology. It’s tempo. The speed at which we share leaves no time for meaning to settle. We live in perpetual broadcast mode, transmitting before understanding.
This impulse isn’t confined to screens. It has seeped into how we move through the world. You can’t sit down for coffee without seeing someone lift a phone before lifting the cup. At concerts, a sea of hands glows in the dark — each one framing proof of presence. We run, we eat, we travel, we fall in love, and at every turn the instinct to document precedes the instinct to live. The device isn’t the problem. It’s what it has turned us into: narrators of immediacy. We record as we exist, composing fragments of proof instead of fragments of memory. Experience itself has become performance — staged for an imagined audience, rendered visible to feel real. We no longer simply go to the sea; we post the sea. We no longer meet a friend; we announce we met.
This need to share everything has eroded the quiet that once allowed meaning to form — the silence between seeing and saying.
The Regurgitator lives in permanent transmission. He doesn’t look — he produces. His relationship with the world is one of continuous output, a loop of capture and release. To pause would mean to vanish, and in his economy, invisibility equals nonexistence. He records as he moves, narrates as he lives. Every gesture becomes a post, every experience a fragment of proof. His memory exists in the cloud, his validation in the count of hearts below the image. The rhythm of his life is not set by tides or daylight, but by notifications. What he creates is not content but residue — traces of reaction.
The act of making has been replaced by the act of updating. He doesn’t digest what he sees; he regurgitates it, instantly.
But this is not a matter of intention or character. Most have simply been drawn into a system built to reward visibility and speed — a system that whispers that to be seen is to belong. The feedback loop feeds the most fragile part of us: the one that fears irrelevance, the one that needs to be confirmed. In that loop, the connection with the world becomes thinner, replaced by the connection with the screen. Experience turns into performance, and performance becomes identity. The result is not dramatic but quiet — a subtle erosion of depth, a gentle forgetting of how to live without the need to prove we are.
The Curator moves differently. He doesn’t resist technology, but he resists its tempo. He knows that what gives an image its meaning is not the instant it’s captured, but the time allowed for it to breathe. He photographs, then waits. He observes, then returns. He sits with what he’s seen until the noise around it fades and what remains begins to speak. He understands that time edits more honestly than any software. He knows that silence is not absence — it’s where resonance begins.
When he shares, it isn’t to feed a presence but to release something that has ripened. His posts are not interruptions but continuations of thought — fragments of meaning discovered after the initial act of looking. In a culture that moves at the speed of reaction, this patience feels almost radical.
It’s not nostalgia for slowness, but trust in depth. He doesn’t chase relevance; he cultivates coherence.
His rhythm is closer to the natural world — to tides, to cycles, to seasons. What he creates carries traces of time, of having lived with the subject long enough to understand it. His work is not proof of having been there. It’s evidence of having stayed.
Immediacy takes many shapes. Some need to share now, in the very moment of doing. Others wait a day, perhaps two, but the impulse is the same — to remain visible, to occupy the feed before the current moves on. The distance between creation and publication has collapsed. I see it constantly in the professional sphere: clients asking for same-day edits, overnight recaps, instant visibility. The event isn’t finished before it’s already being packaged and distributed. The work becomes proof of activity, not a reflection of it.
Behind this acceleration hides the same quiet fear that drives the Regurgitator — the fear of absence, the dread of silence. The belief that if we’re not seen immediately, we’ll disappear. But meaning doesn’t vanish with time; it needs time. What vanishes is only the illusion of constant presence — that brief flicker of relevance that burns out before anything real can form.
The system feeds on speed. It rewards whoever speaks first, not whoever says something worth hearing. In this economy, noise is currency.
Everywhere you turn, someone is selling visibility — courses, shortcuts, formulas for relevance. The promise is always the same: be seen, stay seen, never disappear. It’s a business built on fear — the fear of silence, the fear of being left behind.
This culture of perpetual output has created its own priesthood of immediacy: experts in engagement, prophets of the algorithm, vendors of presence. Their language is one of metrics, reach, and growth. What they sell is not craft but velocity. In that marketplace, attention is auctioned, authenticity repackaged, and even reflection turned into a performance of thought. Everyone becomes both seller and product. The result is an endless fairground of noise where discernment grows thin and fatigue becomes the common pulse. The danger is not only that we buy into these illusions, but that we begin to measure ourselves through them — to mistake motion for progress, and exposure for relevance. Meaning becomes secondary, an afterthought.
The work exists only to confirm activity.
But work made in haste rarely endures. When everything is optimized for speed, nothing has time to root itself in experience. What remains is a blur of declarations — the sound of a culture talking to itself, louder and faster each day, without listening.
Against this current, I keep returning to the act of observing. It’s simple, almost invisible, and yet it feels increasingly rare.
To observe is to resist the pull of immediacy — not by refusing the world, but by standing still within it. It’s an act of attention, a form of respect.
Observation doesn’t reject technology; it reclaims the space between impulse and response. It allows what we see to pass through us, to find its weight before we give it form. Perhaps that’s what storytelling has always been — a way of turning experience into understanding. But that requires distance — the small silence in which things begin to make sense.
The challenge, for creators and for brands alike, is to recover that distance. To accept that meaning doesn’t happen in real time.
That reflection is not delay but depth. Somewhere along the way, we began to confuse activity with life.
Yet life still happens in the pauses — in the unrecorded, unshared, unseen.
Maybe the future belongs not to those who publish first, but to those who still know how to see.
