Stop Tweeting About Life and Start Living It

Last week, someone famous whose name escapes me, tweeted: “Stop Tweeting about life and start living it.”

Although I chuckled a bit when I read that, it made complete sense.

Technology is such an everyday part of our lives, sometimes we spend too much time fiddling with our gadgets, instead of enjoying life.

I experienced this over the weekend. I went for a hike with one of my meetup.com groups. Meetups are great ways to make friends in the real world. I’ve been with this particular meetup group for some time, and have made some great friends through it.

We went for a hike in a beautiful river park, dotted with waterfalls, swans swimming along the river, and the lushness of green leaves and wild flowers everywhere. It was a wonderful way to get back to nature, and away from technology for a few hours.

Or so I thought.

Every time we approached a waterfall, swans swimming, or any of the other natural eye-pleasing beauties, people grabbed their smartphones and ran as close as they could to snap a picture.

I’m guilty of this too. I’d be happily chatting with someone during the hike, enjoying the conversation and the fresh air, only to occasionally break up reality, so I could take a picture with my iPhone.

Our technology allows us to share our experiences with others from around the world, but doesn’t it seem to be self-defeating when the need to share with people you may never actually meet, takes you away from those in the real world?

Or worse, doesn’t it seem odd that technology steals us away from living the moments of our lives, as we come to a full stop to capture the moment, instead of experiencing it?

As we continued on our hike, I took fewer and fewer pictures, because I wanted to experience the hike, nature and share the moments with those present in those moments, rather than losing out on the experience, to share with complete strangers that may never really be part of my life.

Not that those that follow me online aren’t unique and engaging individuals. Just the chances of most of the people I chat with online of actually meeting in the real world and getting to know each other well is slim to none.

And I think that’s where we lose out on life –when we focus all our energies on sharing the experiences with others outside of those experiences, instead of living those experiences in the here and now with those involved in those experiences.

The online world is a great place to lose yourself, and forget about the problems of the real world. But it is not a replacement for the real world. Eventually, we all have to go back to reality, and live our lives.

So from now on, I’ll make sure to live life in the moment – though I may stop a few times to share with the online world.