A Blurry Thai Monkey in a Diaper: How Photo Sharing is Making Us Sadder

Ben is a regular Notable contributor and just recently visited Thailand for the first time, in his thirties. This is one of a few stories he’s eager to share…

My girlfriend and I boarded a ship set for the island of Koh Phi Phi Don in southern Thailand. As we entered the passenger’s cabin, she let out a gasp of excitement and pinched my arm with a clear pressure of urgency.

“Did you see the monkey???”

“No,” I replied, and followed her index finger to the back row of the cabin. Seated there was a Thai woman rubbing the back of a small creature clung to her neck like a fur pendant. The creature was in fact a baby monkey wearing a diaper.
We both flashed the standard “OMG, that’s literally the cutest thing ever” face and immediately agreed that before the boat ride was over, we both needed to hold the monkey. About 20 minutes into the trip, we had our opening. Two other tourists approached the owner and said something. Then, without hesitation, we saw the woman hand over the urine-proofed primate to the strangers. It was on; we quickly scurried over to the action.

First, my girlfriend held the monkey for about 30 seconds while I snapped a few pictures of the cuteness with her iPhone. Then, without any issues, she passed him over and I held the monkey for about 45 seconds while she took shots with my old-school wallet-size digital camera. Somewhere during my epic photo shoot however, her mood quickly shifted from excitement to mild panic. She was looking at her phone.

“Ben, the pictures you took are blurry. Can you give him back to me?”

She showed me the photos I took. They were what most would categorize as, “a bit blurry”. Fair.

“Ok,” I replied.

I gently wrapped my hands around the monkey’s ribs and pulled his body away from mine. As I did this, he tightened his forearms around my neck and clutched my basketball jersey. He didn’t want to go anywhere. 

“I can’t pull him off. He won’t let go. Look,” I said as I separated my hands and arms from the monkey, illustrating that his grip had gotten so tight that my physical support was no longer necessary.

“Just pull him off. She’s going to want him back soon and I want to get another picture.”

“I know,” I replied. “But I don’t know what to do. I don’t feel comfortable just yanking this guy off my chest. Every time I tug him away, he grips tighter. I don’t want to do something to freak him out.”

We were at an impasse. She wanted more photos with a monkey but I was oblivious to the physical etiquette of tearing one off my neck. Why the hand-off was not an issue for her, I didn’t know, but if some Thai monkey started having a tantrum on my throat, I would have been the next passenger to require a diaper.

Sure enough, the owner sensed a dilemma and signalled me to walk towards her. She took her fingers, confidently slid them under the monkey’s, and pried him off of my neck by the hands. He quickly turned and clung back to her chest.

Our moment with the monkey was over.
As we went back to our seats, it was very clear that my girlfriend was unhappy about what had just transpired. While I could acknowledge some valid frustration, this was confusing because what had just transpired was that for the first time in our lives, we had gotten the opportunity to hold, pet and take photos with a really tiny monkey wearing a diaper. Given that I had no way of confirming the contraction of lice or some deadly virus that required help from Dustin Hoffman, I could see no real downside to the whole experience.

The next day we took a boat tour to the now-famous Maya Bay where in 2000, the movie The Beach was filmed. It is stunning. While I admired the scenery, I couldn’t help but notice people spending their entire time on the beach taking selfies. It would have been one thing if they were energetically popping around the site capturing various backgrounds, but instead, I watched several individuals and groups spend multiple stretches of five or more minutes taking the same selfie.
Why, I thought? Why take the same picture over and over and over for so long when with each minute that passes, you are forfeiting the absorption of such rare natural beauty right around you? And then I started thinking about the selfie culture, and about social media in general, and it all hit me.

People didn’t just need a photo of their experience; they needed a photo of their experience that was postable and likeable.

They needed a photo that was clear enough, flattering enough, and perfect enough that it was worthy of representing their lives on social media and – presumably – worthy of validation in the form of “Likes”, loves, and positive commentary. Otherwise, why all the fuss?
What troubles me most about this realization is that in our haze of habitual photo-sharing, we no longer just append but now include the public posting of a photo as an integral part of the very experience being photographed. In other words, it’s like we see the eventual photo-share and the positive feedback it generates as the ultimate finale to our experiences. And that has serious implications on the memory of our experiences and thus, an overall judgment of our well-being.

First, it means that capturing an exceptional photo becomes an inescapable priority of the experience. If our attention is fixated on taking the perfect photo, made more difficult by our relentless desire to include our best-looking selves in that photo, we are likely weakening our future memory of the experience; a real effect seen in a 2013 study out of Fairfield University in Connecticut. Not to mention the added consideration we naturally apply in real-time to photos intended for social media; what filters should be applied? What’s a funny caption? What will the hashtags be?
Second, and most importantly, this all means that a great deal of our positive recollection is made dependent on the posting of a well-received photograph, and positive recollection is essentially all we have when it comes to deciding whether or not we enjoyed something in the past.

Thinking Fast and Slow is a book everyone should read. It was written by Nobel Prize-winning Economist, Daniel Kahneman and explains a lot about how our brains work. In the book, Kahneman spends some time explaining how an overall impression of our own well-being is a product of our broadly-focused “Remembering Self”, rather than the sum of granular inputs provided by our minute-to-minute “Experiencing Self”.
The way The Remembering Self generally works is that it assesses the happiness or sadness experienced during an event by effectively averaging out our responses to “the peak” moment and “the end” moment of that event. In other words, we tend to remember the physical and emotional value of an event based on a rough average of the most and the last.

So think about what that means for the person who has decided that the optimal end to a particular event is the broadcasting of an incredible photo taken during the event, and the wave of public validation that photo inspires.

What if they run out of batteries? What if their device isn’t accessible? What if it’s not working properly? What if the lighting is terrible? What if they run out of time? What if there’s an annoying couple in the background? What if nobody acknowledges the photo?

WHAT IF THE MONKEY IS BLURRY?

It’s not about “being in the moment” or whatever ambiguous clichés people want to throw around to sound philosophical. It’s about being happy and acknowledging that the events in our lives have brought us happiness. Upgrading optional fanfare like Instagram posts from “bonus” to “obligatory” runs the very real risk of smudging our memories and making us think that our experiences and our lives are not as exciting and remarkable as they truly are.

What we capture and what we share offers us the opportunity to improve our lives. But when the prospect of what we don’t capture and what we don’t share starts to define our lives, we are flirting with dangerous perspective.

And as anyone who’s ever taken a selfie knows; it’s all about perspective.
 

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