Picture 'Perfect'

Have you ever watched a movie with tears or you just keep laughing out loud?
How about a picture or a photo? Have you got your emotions pouring out when you see it?

Let me give you a common example, especially for female teenagers I suppose.

Imagine you had just broken up with your boyfriend. Then within next six months, you were so curious with his life and you decided to take a very quick look on his Facebook.

Yes. It was so quick when you were sneaking on his profile while it took an hour to see his latest photos with his new girlfriend. Tada!

There you go. You saw the photos. You saw how they were hugging each other, how they took a romantic photo with the background of sunset in a beach and it was captioned as ‘me and you = us’.

You suddenly witnessed a romantic couple falling in love so deeply just after you ended your messy relationship with the guy.

So, tell me. How is your feeling when you see it? Or, how would you react on it?

I believe some women would burst into tears, angry, mad, and emotionally frustrated. Or perhaps, there would be some women that are cool with that, then shutting down her PC and just keep moving on with her life.

The point is that we can get emotionally reacted to pictures or movies. I agree with the statement that movie, as a motion picture can show you a real scene of what’s happening in human’s life. A movie can show you how hurt it is when people broken-hearted or how excited when a mother had her first hug with her baby born. Simply, scenes in movie are actually a metaphor of our daily lives (not including science-fiction here).

Yet, pictures are different. While a movie is showing you scenes of real events (although it is fiction), a picture often shows you something that is not really happened.

For instance, you see in a photo, a romantic couple smiling widely and holding tight their hands. At first glance, you might think this couple is in love. You thought that they are a lovely couple and they must have a very good relationship. But, you often forget that a photo is not moving. You do not really know what’s going on with their relationship.

The probability of them having a very good relationship is actually unknown. There are a lot of other chances that something is going on with them. They might have put their lovely photos, but come on, who are going to upload a photo when you are fighting with your partner? Who would even think to take a picture while it’s happening?

Or else, they might have a boring relationship. You know, sometimes when everything is going so smoothly, it doesn’t mean that everything goes well. Human is easily getting bored. When there is no problem, humans will get bored eventually as they will feel empty with no challenge in their lives.

It doesn’t mean that we should think that something wrong might happen with the people inside the photo. It just implies that you know nothing about them from seeing a photo or a picture.

Let’s take another example. There were some people in Facebook that actually did a suicide. But when you were looking at their photos, they looked as happy as other people. It seems like their lives were as good as others. So, you start wondering, what has actually happened with them?

This fact is telling us that a picture somehow cannot portray our real lives. You think your friend who lives in overseas is so happy with her life, but she may not. You think your other friend is so happy with her job promotion when you saw her celebration photos, but she may not.

The point is, you do not know. No one really knows what’s going on except themselves.

So when it comes to our reaction seeing photos of other people (especially someone we know), we do not need to react emotionally.

We don’t need to be jealous with our friend seeing photos of his brand new two-storey house. We don’t need to be mad at ex’s photos showing how tight he hugged his new girlfriend. We don’t need all those emotions.

Just think it flat. And think it right.

A photo is not a motion picture. It is flat and only has two dimensions. It only captures few seconds of human’s life (think about the time between you stay still and someone click on your camera to get it done. It only takes few seconds).

How can it be so silly when people judge other people based on something that is captured within less than 10 seconds?

See the point here? Having emotional reaction to photos is not necessarily right. When you see a stay-still picture, there is no point to be emotional.