Photo realist

As part of a general clear out I have been going through all my photos, the physical ones. I'm throwing a lot of them away, I mean obviously the destruction of hundreds of photos of unknown people's feet in unidentifiable locations will be a tragic loss to the world, but in the name of space saving, they have to go. The sorting process has been a trip down memory lane for me, at least when I come across a photo of a person. It turns out that I am actually not that fascinated by all the unidentifiable buildings ("erm... another cathedral... Bourges?"), forests, hilly landscapes and urban wastelands that I have visited in my life. It turns out that all those photos are just a needless byproduct of being a pretentious tit and they're going in the bin.
Of all the photos left, all the wheat in this sea of chaff, Miss P was heard to comment that "photos from the 90s are so grungy", and on both a conceptual and visual level I guess she'd be right. She clearly saw this as a big minus. Me, not so much. That is my past, it is filled with memories (mainly happy - who takes photos of unhappy events? Christmas excluded of course*) and they are not diminished by the fact that many of the photos are out of focus, or badly framed, or the fact that I (and almost all of my male friends) have long centre-parted curtains in many of them. That is how we were, and close enough to how we looked to aide the recollection of the events documented. When we took photos and then put them in albums or boxes, or wherever, that was all they were: an aide memoir, a register of the highlights of our lives.
Photographs obviously still serve the purpose of capturing memories, indeed I think I may have previously argued that we are in some way outsourcing our memories to social media via the images that we store there. However, the other aspect of this method of storage changes the images and their purpose significantly. I read recently that the average young person takes 20 versions of each selfie before deciding which one to share with the world and presumably delete the rest. This must consume a hell of a lot of time, presumably making selfie taking and editing an activity in itself.
"What did you do at the weekend?"
"Oh, mainly selfies."
Not that all the hours of my youth were gainfully employed. I've been thinking about this recently and marvelling at the amount of time I spent basically doing nothing. What luxury. The internet basically allows people to socialise these periods of doing nothing, to rebrand them as productive periods, because god forbid we should be idle even in our leisure time. Everything must have a product, we must always be promoting ourselves at the very least; winning at the game of life and that means being seen to be winning at the game of life. The photos of my youth are largely dull and inconsequential, but then so are most of the photos on most Instagram accounts, it's just that they are presented as having significance. And if we start to believe that presentation is significance, then we stop bothering to look for significance or meaning in anything else.
I am old enough for many of my friends to be managing 'millennials', and there is a constant refrain that they are obsessed with position and promotion without really understanding the need to become expert (or even competent) at your current job first. Whilst the ambition is impressive, the lack of understanding of the substance that needs to back up that ambition is worrying. I'm probably being alarmist and massively out of touch and I'm sure I'm the mug for working myself to the bone in the hope of (relatively) meagre reward. In all likelihood work itself will change massively and sooner or later the only requirement for a management position will be an impressive portfolio of photos of you looking managerial.
To the outside observer, most of the activities of my youth were dull and inconsequential, but to me they were significant and life affirming. We took photos of them occasionally to remember the event, not to present it to the world. Indeed we often worried that the 'world' (and especially our parents) might see them. Of course, all the statistics seem to suggest that we had better reason than any other generation to be wary of sharing details of our leisure activities. We were so busy doing things our parents wouldn't approve of that we forgot to get identified as a generation (for the last time we are not generation X, they were older and more boring). Of course it's hard to know if the suspicion over sharing our lives came from the nefarious nature of the activities themselves or whether the lack of an easy platform to share meant that we tried more nefarious activities out of boredom. Either way we grew up less scrutinised and less polished. The photos prove it: they are terrible. With no concept of needing to present, there is no need to conform to a definition of good presentation. If you are not constantly subjected to the image of conformity, you are less likely to feel the need to conform. My generation consumed only the media they deemed fit, not the media that was deemed fit for them. As a teenager, my worldview was formed almost exclusively by the NME, Melody Maker, Select, the Word, Naked City and Eurotrash. It was a very narrow worldview, but equally it was (relatively) distinct, it was not informed by a standardised aesthetic or dictated by the tyranny of the majority. Your teenage years are the time when you are allowed to experiment, to find your place in relation to society. By definition social media require that place to be somewhere inside of society, a society defined and regulated by its media. Is it surprising then that the youth of today confirm so neatly to what society expects as good behaviour when they consider every aspect of their lives in terms of it being submitted for review? Orwell's dystopian vision was of a malevolent state judging its citizens' actions against its own interests, but perhaps just as frightening is an extra-national, extra-governmental entity judging all citizens actions against an ever shifting set of criteria based largely on commerce and prejudice. Even more scary is its citizens' willingness to submit to the scrutiny and to conform. God help us if someone does work out how to control all those criteria, especially if that someone is Robert Mercer.
Obviously I'm biased, my generation had freedom from the tyranny of internet judgement and we did what we pleased; we liked the idea of sticking it to the man or changing the world, but were largely too wasted to actually get round to doing it. Many millennials seem genuinely motivated to change their world and appear to have at their disposal a fantastic tool to do so. But I can't help but worry that internet activism ends up being just another one of the criteria of conformity: with your 'cause' being simply another aspect of your online identity, just as subject to the judgements of the moral majority as your selfie haircut. There is no doubt that the photographs of my youthful activities are not pretty, indeed they could accurately be described as grungy, but they recorded the activities that me and my friends chose, not those in which the rest of the world expected to see us engaged.

*I think I count Christmas as a neutral mainly

Plane Privilege

I have always loved flying. From the first time I got in an aeroplane age 9 to fly to Majorca, I've loved it. I find take off thrilling: the momentary sense of falling when the plane first leaves the ground, everything rapidly shrinking to model then map scale, the clouds flicking past, the guaranteed blinding sunshine. I love it. I never ever get tired of looking out of aeroplane windows (unless it's nighttime and cloudy below). It is a massive privilege that no human ever experienced until about 110 years ago and, if we carry on the way we're going, no human will be able to experience in 110 years time.
In the last 18 months I have flown over 130,000 miles for work and that is not a brag, I am slightly ashamed of that fact. I'm going to spend the rest of my life working off my carbon footprint. Most of the time when I fly back home, my flight is the first to land in Heathrow and I always think about my friends who endlessly tweet about plane noise from Heathrow early in the morning. Sorry guys.
Such a ridiculous amount of flying inevitably brings with it 'rewards': I have fairly rapidly climbed through the ranks of the frequent flyer programme of a well known airline and have recently reached 'the top' (although people who care about these things assure me that there is a special club for people who presumably rarely actually ever get off a plane) only to discover that the first class lounge seems designed solely to hide all the total pricks who think that flying a lot makes them automatically superior to everyone else, so that you good people don't have to put up with them striding around and bellowing into their phones anywhere else in the airport. In my limited experience of them, first class lounges are barely any nicer than their business class counterparts. They always have champagne, but often less choice of other things. What pervades in all that I have encountered is the overwhelming sense of entitlement emanating from their occupants. There is a feeling that  being afforded the massive privilege of being able to travel vast distances comfortably and quickly, whilst being plied with free booze and food in some way renders them übermensch. Once you begin to believe this fallacy, there is no end to the shitty ways you think it is acceptable to behave. I have seen a man sit in his aeroplane seat and watch whilst a member of cabin crew picked his work up from the floor and put it away in the overhead locker. He did not thank her. He was not busy doing anything else, he was simply sitting there watching, being fat and self-important. No one in business class ever seems to look out of the window. No one ever seems to gaze down at the world in wonder. I'm sure there are others, but usually it feels like it's just me who stares out of the top deck of an A380 and wonders how the hell it's going to get off the ground.
This a shame, but I guess it is the shame of all privilege: that those party to it will rarely take the time to appreciate it. They are either too accustomed to it to understand that it is a privilege or too busy worrying if someone else has more. That is most notably the case when you are able to fly in comfort, but to some extent all flying is a privilege that will always be afforded to only a minority of humanity past, present and future. Maybe remember that next time you get the opportunity to gaze down on your world from 30,000 feet.