Minimalism as Refusing to Curate
What if no one is actually watching? What if your life doesn't have to photograph well to be a good life?
6/25/20264 min read
Last month, I caught myself arranging coffee for a photograph I had no plan to take.
The children were already at daycare, so I had free time. No one had asked to see the coffee, no one knew it existed. I carried the mug to the kitchen window because the light was good. Before I drank, my hand moved the cup a few inches to the left. I turned the spoon so it caught the sun. I shifted the plant on the windowsill into the corner of the scene.
The coffee was getting cold while I prepared it for an absent witness.
Recognition arrived with embarrassment. Some part of me had learned to stage private life before living it. The camera had moved from my hand into my perception. A director had taken up residence in my head and begun producing a slideshow I had never commissioned, even during the thin mercy of a child-free Tuesday morning.
I drank from the less attractive side of the cup and tried to work out when she had been hired. She had been working for years. I could hear her in restaurants when I studied a table before deciding whether the meal appealed to me. She came on walks, composing pictures I had no intention of taking. She interrupted conversations by stepping me half an inch outside them, already shaping the later telling. She had opinions about the shelves in our house, about the blanket over the chair, about whether ordinary domestic objects looked accidental or chosen.
I had become the cinematographer of a film no one would see.
The phone did not invent this. People performed before front-facing cameras existed. We dressed dinner tables for guests who cancelled. We cleaned before the cleaner came. We improved weekend stories in the telling. The performing self is old. The phone gave it a channel, an archive, and eventually a work schedule.
The change was access. Once the camera lived in the pocket, every scene became eligible. The edit began before the experience ended. A restaurant could be judged by its light before the food arrived. A walk could be measured by whether it would post well. A holiday could be lived partly through the body and partly through the imagined album.
Training does not end when the device goes away. Put the phone in another room and the director keeps working.
The cost is attention.
To live an experience while preparing it for display, the mind has to split its labor. One part tastes, listens, touches, answers the child, notices the weather, follows the conversation. The other part evaluates the scene. How does this look? Is it worth saving? How would I caption it? What kind of person does this make me appear to be?
Those questions spend the same attention needed for the life they are inspecting. They add a production layer to direct experience. Over time, that layer makes ordinary life feel slightly thinned out, as if we are present at a remove.
We are there, and we are watching ourselves be there. The watching takes its share.
The triplets made this impossible to ignore. Three small children cannot be curated for long. They reject staging with the full force of their bodies. They remove bows, smear yogurt on furniture, scream during golden-hour photographs, and treat matching outfits as a challenge to be defeated.
I tried anyway for a while. I bought the outfits, arranged the pictures, wrote the captions. Eventually fatigue did what wisdom had not done. I stopped.
The days themselves were still loud, sticky, repetitive, and frequently absurd. The improvement came from my location inside them. I was no longer standing behind a camera I wasn’t holding.
An undocumented life turned out to be easier to inhabit.
So the useful question is simple: who is all this documentation for?
Many of us cannot answer cleanly. It began, perhaps, with sharing. With memory. With affection. With the sane wish to keep a record of things that pass too quickly. Yet the production continued long after the audience became vague. We edit for a viewer we cannot name, toward a version of ourselves who looks better than the person actually standing in the kitchen.
A lot of exhaustion lives in that distance. Curated honesty is still curated. The messy photo is selected. The unposed caption is written. The proof of realness is still proof, prepared for inspection. The director has not left; she has changed the visual style.
The alternative is less dramatic than quitting the internet or throwing the phone into a river. It begins with leaving some moments unarranged. Eating the meal before judging its appearance. Letting the house look the way it looks when people live there. Taking the walk without auditioning the trees. Drinking the coffee from the angle where the hand happened to set it down.
The light through the kitchen window was good that morning. The coffee was hot, briefly. The room gave me a few minutes of privacy, and I almost spent them making privacy presentable.
What would change if the imagined viewer clocked out?
How would we eat, speak, dress, decorate, parent, rest, and spend our Sundays if no hidden audience had to be satisfied?
Which parts of our days are we living, and which parts are we producing?
If the production stopped, we might find a life less polished than the one we keep framing. We might also find it easier to enter.
P.S. I drank the coffee. It was good. Nobody saw it. The lack of a photograph did not make it less coffee, though I apparently needed the reminder.
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