Life can’t be edited to 30 Seconds: That sucks

 

Life happens and can’t be fast-forwarded. I always crack the joke “Can this lecture be put in 2x while a faculty is taking the class”. The way we perceive life has changed and it has been changing since the change of changes. Life to us is how life is portrayed by the things we consume. I can remember old movies which are slow but challenged how life is perceived only through sudden flashbacks and 10 years later flashcards only to show the protagonist as a grown man with a mustache, there too we assume a life that the protagonist has gone through and it too was happening in 1x. We used to see various ways in which people used to project what life is and even with the evolving pace and density, it still used to somehow feel less real than actual life. I am sorry if the point I am trying to put forward sounds weird. I can’t make this into a 30-second reel, trust me I tried compressing my thoughts to 5 bold captions, but sadly I only got the music. Hang in there, we will solve this.

 

If I recollect my childhood it is happening in real-time. I can remember how that day we recovered a plastic ball worth 5 rupees from a canal filled with waste. My memories were rarely fast-paced and rarely were they a montage of various things that happened across a period of 1 month (like a vacation). I love the before the trilogy, especially before sunrise, the way life is captured without major cuts, and long conversations that don’t end when a revelation occurs or a joke ends just reflect life. I am huge sucker for things that just feel more alive than life on steroids with brilliantly cut montages. I like “Bade Ache Lagte hain” song and that is really slow and that kinda helps me connect how I will handle someone leaving me maybe.

 

We live in a world, O I hate this phrase, “we live in a world, such an obvious statement”. We live in a world where people project life over the span of a vacation(1 month) as a 30-second reel. There are 10 cuts in a 30-second video and 0 in life and that just makes it difficult. We see how they have gone through various experiences and each experience gets 1.5 seconds each maximum and I find it difficult to watch. I like some of them, the cute ones not gonna lie, but It’s hard to digest how a person projects their life in 30 seconds. There are longer compressions such as world trips of people over years compressed beautifully to 60 seconds with the right music(often a mix of Indian and English songs with the Hindi song coming later only to make you feel connected).  My life doesn’t happen in 30 seconds and can’t be edited so, I mean I can’t think like that. That sucks now that I see how life can be recollected, and how memories can be relieved. I don’t know If I am just FOMO that I am not going to world trips or that I don’t know how to edit clips to 30 seconds. It’s not the cuts that scares, it’s the cuts after the cuts after the cuts, the creation kind of forgot to place a life that makes you face the next second without providing a “Skip to the good part” button. Now I can understand why I even like long shots more, I find it interesting when a character has to face life without an option to jump to next scene.

I only see highlights these days be it of marriage, couples, matches, or history, like everything is a capsule of 30 seconds and the mundanity, failure, and other moments that didn’t aid production of dopamine gets cut out of these highlights and sadly these are the exact parts that contribute to what life is. You win a race for what? 1 day? What about the years you spent preparing? A 30 second preparation reel looks cool, but what about days when you couldn’t get out of bed due to sheer anxiety and failure you faced in the last race during practise? I miss the mundanity maybe? I was rewatching office and I spotted silences and I miss them these days. Even a normal conversation is speed up to 2x so that it fits the 30 second window.

I tried, I tried to make a rewind of 2022 with the best moments in videos and photos, but I failed as I had moments longer than 30 seconds that were too magical that I can’t even cut a second from them forget making 2022 into a 30-second reel. I don’t know if I had a point in the first place now. I might make a 2023 rewind if we reach 2024. Ah shit, I should have made a 30-second reel I guess.