How I Improved My Life Immediately By Not Taking Photos Anymore

Myrth founder Emma McLaren was an incurable photo nerd—until one day, when she suddenly stopped taking photos. This month, she’s dropping in to tell us about her journey from non-stop shutterbug to something more sustainable.

I was probably six years old when I got my first camera. It was a while ago, so it was one of those slim film cameras, and I took it everywhere. Over the years, as technology and my skills improved, I upgraded to various cameras. I loved to take pictures, and I have boxes and boxes of photos from my trips--photos of god knows what, but it was everything. 

In the early to mid-nineties there was no social media, no posting, no sharing selfies – heck, we didn’t even have the word “selfie.” We had photo albums to share in an in-person setting. There were constant jokes about having to look at other people’s holiday photos. “Oh no, Phil, they are probably going to take out the slide deck and show us their pictures from Hawaii. I don’t want to see those.” (This really wasn’t that long ago, you know.)

Anyway, I was that girl with a camera taking pictures everywhere I went. And as the years moved on and my cameras got better and my trips got cooler and the technology changed, I evolved with it. During my first real big trip to Africa, I took what was the equivalent of 1,000 pictures on film, and out of those pics, maybe 12 were good enough to show other people. Then, when I travelled in South East Asia in the mid 2000s, I discovered the selfie. I made my friend and travel buddy take dozens of selfies with me: selfies when we were tired on the bus, selfies in front of the temples, selfies on our motorbikes with our dorky helmets. Then my travel exploded, and I was travelling on my own almost 95% of the time.

The selfie was my friend. I even wrote a blog post about it.

And I posted them—I mean, not excessively, but what else was I going to do with my pictures? I always wrote something profound—or at least, profound to me—under my pictures and made sure they didn’t come across as bragging or showing off. I went to some amazing places and owned my selfie. I even built my brand for Where is Emma the Nomad? on the selfie. As I took hours and hours of video selfies and countless photo selfies, I was showing that even though I was a solo female traveler, I could do anything a guy could do. 

Okay, almost anything, because here’s a funny aside: one time, this guy once wandered into the jungle in Indonesia to live with jungle guards and see orangutans in the wild while living off the floor and not having any connection to the outside world. I wouldn’t do that as a solo female traveler. 

So, this was my brand. I was the solo traveler who took selfies and photos. And I took so. many. selfies. and photos.

Then I stopped. Almost abruptly. If you followed me on social media and could actually keep track of me amongst the noise that is social media, you would have seen that I stopped posting. 

And not only did I stop posting, I stopped taking pictures. Even just pictures with my phone, which I still carry with me everywhere like any other person these days.

I suppose I should tell you that it was around the same time that I found my home. That is a whole other story, but you can read about it here. Now I can honestly say that I don’t know which came first: did I stop taking pictures because I found somewhere I was happiest or was I happier because I stopped taking so many pictures? 

Either way, I now—almost a year later—still haven’t resumed my regular habit of taking pictures. I no longer share to social media. I no longer snap a happy moment. I no longer long to capture on my camera what I am experiencing. 

I suppose sometimes, I feel left out by not being part of the online ecosphere. And sometimes I look back at my picture-taking days with joy because I have those moments captured. But often, what was happening in front of the camera was not what was happening behind the camera. Now, I can without a doubt know that my feelings and my joy don’t have to be captured.

In 2019, picture-taking has become an extreme sport. Older generations could never have predicted just how far selfies and picture-taking would go. As of 2016, 93 million selfies were taken every day—and for what? And now that we have fake videos and photoshopped photos, what is real?

 In one of my favorite books – Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi - the author challenges the reader to reduce screentime, and one area is the photo. She points to some amazing research about how taking pictures actually diminishes our engagement with our experiences. We don’t have the same memory of the moment and don’t absorb the feeling in the same way as if we just took a mental picture.

So I may not be sharing my joy with others on the internet or be able to look back on my photos in years to come, but I will always remember how, by removing this extra activity, I have embraced joy more than at any other time in my life. I am now a person who stands there looking at the trees instead of taking a picture of them. 

Life goes on beyond social media and beyond capturing every moment on “film”. Have you taken a step back to evaluate your photo taking obsession or habit? 

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