The way your hand reaches for your phone before your brain even decides to is the most depressing

Someone’s blowing out birthday candles and my hand is already moving toward my pocket. I didn’t decide anything. There was no thought process. It’s the same part of my brain that catches a falling glass, except what it’s “catching” is a moment I was supposed to just be in. And the stupid thing is I film events for a living, so I know better than anyone what happens to that footage: nothing. It sits in a camera roll forever. Half my actual clients don’t even open the professionally shot files they paid for, so what chance does 45 seconds of shaky vertical candle footage have? But knowing that changes nothing. The hand still moves. We’ve somehow trained ourselves to treat “get proof” as more urgent than “be there,” and it happened so gradually nobody agreed to it. Does anyone actually manage to fight this reflex or have we all just quietly given up?