Our phones have turned simple moments of life into constant performance | Opinion

I watched old home videos this weekend at my parents’ house in Kentucky, recorded on a camcorder sometime in the early 1990s.

The image wobbles when the person holding the camera laughs. The zoom is too fast. Sometimes someone forgets to turn the camera off and the lens points at the floor. Eventually the tape runs out the way tapes always did.

Technically, the footage isn’t very good. But watching it now, it feels heavy with meaning. Part of that is time. But part of it is the effort it once took simply to record a moment.

Someone had to bring out the camcorder. Someone had to carry it around all afternoon. Later someone gathered everyone in the living room and pushed the tape into the machine so we could watch it again. Recording a moment took effort. Watching it again took effort too.

Today the effort has largely disappeared.

Phones appear the moment something begins to happen. Birthday candles, school concerts, soccer goals, vacations. A small rectangle rises into the air and the moment is carefully captured so it can be experienced later. Most of those recordings will never actually be watched.

You see the same thing at concerts. Hundreds of people hold their phones above their heads and watch the performance through a screen instead of directly. The event is happening in front of them, but many of us seem more concerned with documenting the moment than inhabiting it.

Somewhere along the way, experience began to require evidence.

Across much of modern life, effort has quietly been replaced by performance.

We see it in entertainment and social media, but also in public life, where image and messaging increasingly shape how people understand leadership. In Kentucky politics, voters often weigh performance against substance when judging leaders, whether they are watching a rally, a debate or a governor’s press conference.

You can see the shift in youth sports. On many weekends highways fill with families driving to travel tournaments. Parents wake up early and drive hours so their kids can play short games on fields that blur together by mid-afternoon.

Everyone is working hard. But it often feels like a different kind of effort than the games many of us remember as kids. Most of our games were organized by whoever happened to show up. Someone brought a ball. Someone argued about the rules. The game belonged to the kids playing it.

Today childhood sports increasingly resemble a development pipeline. Travel teams, year-round schedules and recruiting tournaments turn play into something closer to preparation. Parents film from the sidelines and highlights are shared online.

None of this happens because parents care less. In many ways it happens because they care more. But somewhere in the process, play begins to look like performance.

I saw something similar happen in my own life.

For several years I built furniture in a small woodworking shop. At the beginning the work was simple and direct. You cut a board and it either fits or it does not. You sand a surface and you can feel the difference with your hand. Effort turns into something tangible.

For a while the shop felt almost meditative. Hours could pass without me noticing.

Eventually the shop turned into a business. Orders came in. A website had to be built. Photos had to be taken and posted. Markets had to be attended. Instead of simply building things, I began thinking about how the work appeared to other people.

The craft itself was still there, but it increasingly lived beside a second job: presenting the craft.

That shift now appears across much of ordinary life. Vacations become curated itineraries. Childhood games move through tournament circuits. Craft becomes content.

The activities themselves haven’t disappeared. Kids still play sports. People still build things. Families still celebrate birthdays and take trips.

But something about the center of gravity has changed. Instead of simply doing these things, we often feel pressure to demonstrate them, to show that life is meaningful, productive or successful.

The appearance of effort begins to replace the experience that once produced it.

Watching those old tapes, I kept noticing something small but important. The camera was there, but it wasn’t running the moment. People weren’t arranging the shot or thinking about how it might look later.

They were simply living the day.

The recording was incidental.

Maybe that is the difference. The effort of living the moment came first, and the camera occasionally followed.

Now the camera often leads, and life arranges itself behind it.

Watching those tapes, it struck me how little proof we once needed that something real had happened.

Being there was enough.

William Ney lives in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, and works as a mental health court worker for the Administrative Office of the Courts in Northern Kentucky. A graduate of Transylvania University, he is pursuing a Master of Education in clinical mental health counseling.