Wow, you look fantastic! How long did you hold your breath?.. Oh, you didn’t know that you hold your breath when you take selfies? You do. You hold your breath, manipulate yourself and your environment into as much stillness as possible, and then once the camera button is clicked, life and breath are allowed back into the moment.

In an attempt to preserve life’s images, selfie-driven humans forget to breathe into their life experiences, preferring instead to capture manufactured moments. It’s highly ironic and borders on destructive.

Looking from the outside into a “selfie” situation, it appears as though Harry Potter’s Death Eaters took the stillness of space, injected it into the duration of a click, and stole your soul for a moment so that you could take a “perfect” picture.

Selfies stifle smart conversations. When a click of one other button (the “like” button) is the beginning and end of a “selfie” discussion, have you grown in wisdom as a person or fostered intelligence in your species? How many times do you have the same “I like” conversation with your screen? How many selfies do humans have to scroll through in order to
find photographs that spark intelligent conversation?

I’m pretty sure that humans are the only animal that stops breathing to admire themselves, and it has disastrous consequences. Situational awareness is on the downslide, partly because of the presence
of phones that are in faces instead of pockets. Society (using capitalism, consumerism, materialism, religion, pharmaceuticals, the cosmetics industry, etc.) pushes humans to aspire to “perfection,” despite the fact that perfection doesn’t exist.

It would be smarter to aspire to look “good” in 3D, with your physical self’s lively interactions and thoughtful conversations.

How much time in your life are you committing to future glances at the picture you just took of yourself, and how much of that time will you spend in self-judgment? Both stopping breathing and self-judgment aren’t healthy. Reminiscing over how the wind quit blowing the “wrong” way so that your hair looked “good” is a waste of your future self’s time and intellect.

If beautiful pictures are an aspiration of yours, I beg you to post blurry selfies, and then talk about them; Mess and fuzziness are indications of movement, breath and life. Beauty can be found in growth, but growth can’t happen without friction, and friction requires movement.

What percentage of planet Earth already says, “Humans were here!”? How much space is “dead” between your television and the nearest patch of natural green? What do those numbers say about the state of human selfishness in today’s society?…