technology

I am a fan of Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Tom Hansen of 500 Days of Summer.

I honestly believe he is one of the most underrated actors out there. But aside from the usual performing arts he does, he directs HitRECord, an international collaboration platform. If you follow him on Twitter or Facebook, you would see how smart he is.

This morning, his question was about going back in time. I found myself reading the comments and based on what I have seen, it all boils down to two things: places and moments.

1. Place they want to go back to

I would want to include time in this category as some one-liner answers go something like New York, 1950. No explanations, just that.

Judging by the commenters’ photos, they are possibly born years after that period.

This told me that, maybe, looking at the world before thru photos make us think of how simple life was then. No technology just pure interpersonal communication. The fashion was different, too. Gender roles could have probabaly been stiffer, but it tells me that people would always long for the things they would never know or are never meant to find out.

I realized that exercises like this reveal our innate gesture of clinging to the past. A past we were never part of, but a product of. It tells me that our generation and future ones would always look for ways to bring back what their precedents would leave behind. Could this only mean that as we progress, we wish to somehow keep all we have had and never make them extinct? That, probably, if we had the physical things all througout the ages, we would always feel complete?

2. Moments they wish they knew were the last

These answers were followed by regrets for after that moment, their lives were changed forever. Morever, all of them wish that they had known so that they could have spent longer hours with it.

Reading was painful. Everybody wanted to change one decision so their lives now might be better. We always have that thought but really, if we would go back in time and tweak it, would our lives really be different?

Nurturing these thoughts not only destroy our potential to be happy and to be responsible for all our decisions, but it also gives us the belief that the life that follows a fateful choice is a broken one. Which isn’t.

There are moments we would want to last because they are happy memories, but then we need to always move forward. Regardless of the emotion involved in a moment, it is always meant to be lived once.

So, this evening, I realized that in order for me to appreciate life a bit more, I need to fuse the past and the present: put technology into a low and focus on the experience as it happens. If I were at the beach, I would take one photo then spend three hours in actual swimming. If I were with a person I love, I would take a photo, then fix my eyes on that person for the rest of the day.

Instagramming can wait. That moment would end.

In this life, we need to make a decision and that is to choose between these: to build a lasting relationship with a mobile device, or to spend real time with real life.

Be real.