The Camera Itself

In January of 2025, I bought an Insta360 Go 3S, largely because my friend had shown me a video of him snowboarding that he had taken on a GoPro attached to his helmet. I wanted something similar, where I could capture not just photos, but entire experiences.

I use the camera all the time, and highly recommend it. It records in up to 4K, and the quality is generally pretty great. It's great for snapping quick clips of whatever you're doing, and the included attachments let me put it on my hat so I can forget about it. It's one of my favorite gadgets, and I almost always take it with me when I go out. I've been compiling my videos into a highlight reel on Instagram, and watching the videos again to make the compilation is a source of great joy.

Shayan's Philosophy on Taking Videos

A partial reason I take these videos is because I want to be able to show my kids what my life was like back in college. My dad always tells me stories of things he did in college, and I love hearing those stories, so I thought taking videos might serve as a way for future me to share my experiences with my kids. I also think future me will appreciate being able to relive some memories.

I find it somewhat difficult to start recording, because when I am in a moment, it's hard for me to think about the fact that at a future point, I will no longer be in that moment. When that future point arrives, I can look back upon my memory of the moment, but my memory is fallible. The videos serve as another way to preserve the moment.

There is a lot of weight in that. When I pick up the camera and start to record, I am actively choosing to preserve a moment, so that future me has something to look back on. The same is sort of implicitly true of our memories and what we choose to remember, but memory tends to be a passive consequence of our existence, rather than an active choice. When the moment is long gone, and when even perhaps my memory of it fails, the camera footage will potentially remain. With that in mind, how can I possibly choose what to keep and what to leave behind?

The first critical lesson I have learned is this: it is okay for moments to be left behind. Part of what makes life so meaningful is that it is ephemeral, and sometimes, you must simply trust that there will be more good moments ahead of you. There is no way back to the past, and we must learn to live with the passage of time. This is the fundamental lesson of The Great Gatsby, embodied in its final quote, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past". You cannot be overly obsessed with revisiting the past, and must instead find a way forward.

Moreover, the act of choosing not to record something has its own power. To consider a moment so important, so valuable, that you put your faith entirely in the capabilities of your memory. Willingly risking forgetting the moment, so as not to let anything distract you from it. There's a scene in the movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty where a photographer has the perfect shot of a snow leopard lined up, and he chooses not to take the shot, chooses to stay in that moment and not let anything distract him from it. My point being, not only is it okay to not capture every moment, but sometimes you are better off for not having done so.

The moments I capture are valuable to me, and I love sharing them. I'm not perfect in my philosophy of when I decide to take videos, but as I get older and take more videos, I get better at understanding what they really mean to me. This post serves as a way for me to articulate that. Maybe I'll do another one somewhere down the road.