There are far too many people taking selfies, but there are also far too few people taking selfies.
I know. You’re probably thinking, What the heck does that mean? Bear with me.
First, you need to understand the basic premise of the selfie. At its worst, the selfie is an act of selfishness and vanity. It is the photographic equivalent of standing in the middle of a crowded room, tapping a spoon against a glass, and announcing, “Excuse me, everyone. I feel that you have gone entirely too long without looking at me.”
And we have become very good at it.
We take selfies at restaurants. At concerts. At sporting events. At the beach. At the gym—which I still don’t completely understand because there has never been a moment in my life, halfway through sweating on an elliptical machine, when I thought, You know what needs to be preserved for future generations? This.
We take selfies in front of sunsets, monuments, mountains, famous paintings, and bathroom mirrors. Especially bathroom mirrors. Apparently, sometime during the development of the smartphone, humanity collectively decided that the room containing the toilet was also the ideal portrait studio.
And then there are the poses. The head tilt. The raised eyebrow. The mysterious stare into the middle distance. The slightly elevated camera angle that we all somehow discovered without ever attending the same seminar. And, of course, the duck face. I don’t know who started the duck face. I don’t know why we allowed it to continue. I only know that future anthropologists are going to have questions, and frankly, we deserve that.
Then there is the food selfie.
The food selfie is an entity entirely unto itself. Somewhere along the way, we collectively decided that eating food was no longer enough. Food needed documentation. Evidence. A photographic record.
Your eggs Benedict cannot simply be eaten. They must first be photographed from above. Your hamburger needs proper lighting. Your sushi requires multiple angles. And God help anyone who reaches for a french fry before the photo has been taken.
“WAIT!”
Suddenly Grandma is frozen in place, fork halfway to her mouth, while somebody rearranges the bread basket because apparently the focaccia is throwing off the composition. And nobody is allowed to eat until the meal has completed its photo shoot.
We used to say grace before dinner. Now we adjust the exposure.
And somewhere, there are probably millions of photographs of meals that no one has looked at since approximately eleven seconds after posting them. Seriously. Go through your camera roll. Why do you have fourteen pictures of tacos from 2022? You don’t even remember those tacos. The tacos have moved on. Maybe you should too.
So yes, there are far too many selfies.
But here’s the problem. There are also far too few.
Because somewhere underneath all that vanity, posing, filtering, photographing, retaking, deleting, retaking again, and pretending that the seventeenth photograph was actually the first spontaneous one, there is something else happening.
A selfie can also be an act of self-love. Not the obnoxious, Everyone behold my magnificence kind. Something quieter.
I was here. This happened. This moment mattered to me. I mattered in this moment.
And then there’s the next layer: the “ussie.” Thanks, Ted Lasso.
The ussie changes the equation. Now you’re not awkwardly holding your phone at arm’s length trying to simultaneously smile, suck in your stomach, avoid looking directly at the screen, and somehow keep your thumb out of the photograph. Now you’re dragging somebody else into it.
“Come here.” “No, closer.” “Closer.” “You’re not in it.” “Move your head.” “No, the other way.” “Why are you making that face?” “I’m not making a face.” “That is absolutely not your normal face.” “Just take the picture.”
And then you take six. One person has their eyes closed in the first one. Somebody is looking away in the second. The third catches someone mid-sentence. The fourth is blurry. The fifth is actually pretty good, but someone insists they look terrible. So naturally, you keep the sixth.
And that one isn’t saying, I was here. It’s saying: We were here. Together.
And maybe that’s where the real value of these pictures begins. Because it’s more than just pictures. Much more. We just usually don’t realize it when we’re taking them.
Because here’s the strange thing about photographs: We spend an incredible amount of effort trying to make them look like our lives… instead of letting them show our lives.
We curate. We pose. We straighten the room behind us. We move the dirty coffee cup out of frame. We find the good light. We tilt the camera. We suck it in. We smooth the hair. We tell everybody to smile.
And now, if we don’t particularly care for the person staring back at us from the screen, we can filter that person too. Smooth the skin. Whiten the teeth. Remove a wrinkle. Erase a blemish. Make the sky a little bluer, the sunset a little warmer, the grass a little greener.
Apparently reality has terrible production values.
And I’m not judging. Okay, maybe I’m judging the taco pictures a little. But the rest of it? I get it. We want to look good. We want our lives to look good. We want the photograph to capture the version of the moment we would like to remember.
But I’m beginning to think we may have it backward.
Maybe we need fewer pictures of the lives we want people to think we’re living… and more pictures of the lives we’re actually living.
Take the picture when the house is a mess. Take the picture when nobody did their hair. Take the picture when somebody is laughing so hard that their face looks ridiculous. Take the picture when your kid is making that stupid face you keep telling them to stop making.
Take the picture when Dad is asleep in the recliner with his mouth open. Take the picture of Mom cooking dinner when she tells you, “Oh, don’t take my picture. I look terrible.” Take it anyway.
Take the blurry one. Take the crooked one. Take the one where nobody is looking at the camera. Take the one where everybody looks exactly like themselves.
Because those are the photographs that don’t say: Look at us.
They say: This was us.
There’s a difference. One is performance. The other is memory.
And memory doesn’t care about your good side. It doesn’t care whether the kitchen was clean or whether your hair was done or whether everybody was wearing something Instagram-worthy.
Memory is greedy. It wants the whole thing.
The clutter. The wrinkles. The bad hair. The ridiculous expressions. The ordinary Tuesday nights. The people sitting around the table doing absolutely nothing remarkable.
Especially that.
Because someday, the remarkable thing about that photograph may simply be that everyone in it was there.
And suddenly that badly lit, crooked picture you almost deleted isn’t badly lit or crooked anymore. It’s priceless.
So maybe we don’t need more selfies. And maybe we don’t need fewer selfies.
Maybe we just need more honest ones.
More ussies. More pictures where nobody is showing off. Nobody is performing. Nobody is trying to convince the rest of the world that their life is more interesting, more beautiful, more exciting, or more perfect than it actually is.
Just us. Unfiltered. Uncurated. Imperfect. Laughing. Living. Together.
Because eventually, I was here matters.
But I suspect we were here matters a whole lot more.
There’s more waiting at https://xinkblotz.com.
Telling stories, sharing thoughts, and drinking coffee. A blend of fiction, reflection, and whatever’s brewing—one post at a time.
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© 2026 Mariano Velez ~ InkBlotz Press
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