Modern Life
The thing that prompted me to write this was a documentary I recently watched about Xanax and the ever-increasing mental health issues people face today. The documentary traced the earliest mentions of anxiety related illnesses on a fairly broad scale…
Swimming
I’ve been able to swim as long as I can remember. This is undoubtedly due to the five (or more?) years of swimming lessons my parents enrolled me in from a young age, and the fact that my childhood home…
Why Take Photos?
Several years ago I was living alone in Hawaii with few friends and no social media. I leaned into this by also not carrying my phone with me most of the time, or intentionally keeping it turned off and/or in…
Alone
As usual I’m typing this with no clear direction and only the general topic in mind, so we’ll have to wait and find out together what this post ends up becoming. I’ve felt alone for much of my life, sometimes…
Introspection vs Extrospection
The construction of a concept of self, and our perception of that self is a complicated and confusing issue, at least for me. Some of the world’s philosophies say that at our core, we have no innate self, only an…
The Joy of Missing Out
When I first thought of the topic and name of this post, I was unaware that there is a book with the same name, which I have not read. I only discovered it because I googled my title to see…
Information Obsession
I wrote this several weeks ago and forgot to publish it. As usual, I have been sitting around thinking too much about things lately. Several topics have been regularly crossing my mind: resuming my meditation/zen/mindfulness/whatever practice, practicing drawing, how to…
Product vs Process
I’ve recently decided to start practicing drawing (again). For me to say ‘again’ is a bit questionable because I feel like nearly every time I have drawn in the past, I was aiming to create a specific work, such as…
I Hate Perfectionism
“I am fucking sick of perfectionism,” was all I could think to write after frustratedly scribbling over the previous page of neatly written cursive in my notebook. I’m sure my frustration came from several sources, but in this moment the…
How to Improve Your Sense of Direction
I’ll start this post with a few of my experiences and then give concrete tips at the end. When I was a kid, my dad used to always ask me what direction was North when we were in the car.…
Suffering, Connection, and Realness
I have had a contentious relationship with social media for many years, but my initial experience was very positive. When I was young (around middle school), I liked to use social media (DeviantArt, Myspace, etc.) to connect and chat with…
Why I Love GR Cameras
If you know me (in a photography context) then I’m sure you already know how much I love Ricoh GR cameras. You can read more about my general journey into photography in my post How It Started, but in this…
Mindfulness, Wellbeing, and Smartphones
Much of smartphone usage is essentially the opposite of mindfulness; we use smartphones specifically so we don’t have to face the boredom of the present moment, or because we want to engage with ‘something else’ that is not our present…
Reflection on Chinese Language Challenge
This has been a very long month, and I intend to keep this reflection short (for a change). In hindsight, I think a whole month language challenge may have been a bit too ambitious, but I ended up completing the…
One Month Chinese Language Challenge
In my post One Week Digital Detox Reflection, I mentioned the possibility of doing a language-learning related challenge. As I am sure most of you who have read my posts are aware by now, I am not great at doing things…
I Got Covid
I’m not writing this because getting covid is in any way unusual these days, but it’s noteworthy for me because I’ve been waiting so long and it’s finally happened! By now it has been almost a week since my first…
Mediocrity
I am becoming acutely aware of the mediocrity of my photos. Earlier today (at the time of writing) I was thinking about how a lot of my recent blog posts are unrelated to photography (or only tangentially related), even though…
One Week Digital Detox Reflection
I started to draft this on Tuesday even though my digital detox will not end until Thursday. This is partially because I have already taken so many notes that I think it will take me a lot of time to…
Digital Detox
Lately I’ve found myself being too influenced by technology, other people, and my perceptions surrounding these things, whether it be through social media, text messaging, or whatever else. This influence may come in the form of self-comparison, praise/criticism, others’ expectations…
2-Week Update on Not Using Instagram
I guess technically it has been 13 days, so not exactly 2 weeks, since I deleted my Instagram accounts, but whatever, I’m just going to write this short reflection today because I have the time and motivation, and tomorrow will…
Language Learning
Although this site is primarily focused on photography, I find it a bit funny that I have essentially not even mentioned language learning, which is an even bigger interest/hobby of mine than photography and has impacted my life in major…
Isolation
I’m starting to realize that the reason my Instagram and social media usage has grown more problematic recently is because I’ve been using digital interaction as a substitute for real face-to-face interaction. When I think back on living in Hawaii,…
On Being Profound
I get the feeling that a lot of people have a strong desire to be seen as special in some way, myself included, but on some level this desire has always bothered me (both seeing it in myself and in…
Lack of Self-Control
Last night was the first decent night of sleep I’ve had in a while, in terms of sleep quality, not the number of hours. On weeknights I usually fall asleep sometime between 11pm and 1am and wake up at 7am…
The Way I Take Photos
A lot of times when people ask me why I take the type of photos that I do (photos of random people/objects, mostly black and white), I reply saying something like: I just randomly take photos of whatever looks interesting…
Positionality and Personalism
One thing that that really stuck in my mind from graduate school was the importance of being aware of one’s positionality (background, race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.) and biases in order to account for them when conducting or interpreting research.…
On Cameras and Intentionality
I’m beginning to write this post with only a vague idea and no clear outline, so we’ll see how this goes. My plan is for it to be a relatively short post, but I can sometimes be a bit long-winded.…
Silence
Several years ago, I read the book Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. Around the same time I also read Silence: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise by Thich Nhat Hanh, so my memory may possibly be…
Asking Strangers to Take Their Photo
A couple weeks ago I decided that during my hiatus from posting on social media, I wanted to undertake some kind of project or personal challenge. Initially I was trying to think of a ‘thematic project’ or something like that,…
Analysis Paralysis
If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s analyzing everything to death. This can be a useful skill for solving problems, being a student, doing research, figuring out new ways to do things, managing finances, etc. But it…
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Austin Barton 