Arthur C. Brooks

It's not the same experience.

This is one of the reasons, by the way, that you'll lower the meaning that you feel on your vacation by 16% by taking pictures.

Yeah, I recommend that one person be assigned to take pictures on your vacation each day.

One person per day.

And that nobody else gets to take any pictures the whole day.

Big difference.

Yeah, because if you're looking through the screen to take a picture of the thing that's right in front of you so that somebody else can enjoy it, maybe you in two years, guess what you've done?

You've turned your experience into a simulation of the experience.

You've turned a right brain experience of beauty into a left brain simulation of the beauty that you thought you once were experiencing but not.

They're not alive right now.

What they are is thinking about the future when they will be looking back and this will be in the past.

Never look at it.

We're funny about time travel.

So this, the executive center of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, which is like the supercomputer of our brain, it allows time travel, which is why Homo sapiens are so successful as a species.

You can think about the past and you can go back and redo the past and think of a better future so you don't make the same mistakes that you made before.

You can go into the future and imagine something that hasn't happened and say, well, that wouldn't be good and not do that.

Or you can be here now, which is what we're most not.

And we're not alive.

You know, there's the famous Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk.

He wrote this great book called The Miracle of Mindfulness that starts with this scenario of washing the dishes.