Don't get too cozy though! Who knows when I'll remember to update next :P
Anyways, the topic of today's post is: instant gratification.
I recently (in the past year) started getting a bit more serious about my photography. At least, serious enough to create a Flickr account that I actually used*. Every time I posted new photos to my account, I wanted to see if anyone had looked at it. Had anyone commented?
Had anyone even noticed that I put up photos?!
One day earlier this semester I came across the term "instant gratification". The idea (in the context I read it) is that we post something online: a picture, status update, blog post, whatever, and instantly want some sort of response for the thing we have just posted.
I realized that this was happening every time I posted a picture on Flickr. I wanted to stop myself from doing this and attempted to become patient instead. I tried to stop clicking the refresh button on my page over and over again until a statistic changed, showing that finally someone had at least viewed one of my photos. But I still haven't mastered patience that much yet.
I still hit refresh every couple of minutes on my Flickr page until I am sufficiently satisfied that someone has appreciated my photos. However, I do acknowledge to myself the ridiculousness that I am fueling by doing this.
I hope to someday remove instant gratification from my mentality completely. I mean, when I take a photo, I'm not thinking about what other people will think. When I'm editing my photos, I'm not thinking about how many people will look at it. It's only when I bother to upload them to Flickr or Facebook, when I bother to share them with other people, that I worry that other people don't want me to share with them.
So, when I really think about it, is it instant gratification I'm worried about, or is reassurance that I'm not doing this all in vain?
I suppose it's something I'll have to keep thinking about, especially as I attempt to blog more often.
Meanwhile, I'm gonna sit here, eat fudge, and maybe watch some TV!
--R.
I hope to someday remove instant gratification from my mentality completely. I mean, when I take a photo, I'm not thinking about what other people will think. When I'm editing my photos, I'm not thinking about how many people will look at it. It's only when I bother to upload them to Flickr or Facebook, when I bother to share them with other people, that I worry that other people don't want me to share with them.
So, when I really think about it, is it instant gratification I'm worried about, or is reassurance that I'm not doing this all in vain?
I suppose it's something I'll have to keep thinking about, especially as I attempt to blog more often.
Meanwhile, I'm gonna sit here, eat fudge, and maybe watch some TV!
--R.
*If you want to feed my neurotic disease, here's a link to my Flickr account! - http://SEEE.it/emn
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