Twelve Hours

I am sitting in a coffee shop. At the table next to me, four or five young women have been taking pictures for the past three hours. Posing, adjusting, reviewing, retaking. I don’t know when they plan to stop.

My brain immediately did the math. Three hours times four people. Twelve hours of human life, right there.

I’ll be honest: my first reaction was that it’s a waste.

I know that’s a brutal framing. And I sat with it for a while, because I don’t think I’m entirely right.

Maybe they are genuinely happy. Maybe this is exactly what a good afternoon looks like to them, and who am I to say otherwise. Maybe there is real satisfaction in it - the craft of a good photo, the social ritual of doing it together, the feeling of looking good and knowing it. Those things are real.

There’s also an evolutionary argument. Looking attractive, projecting an image, attracting attention - these are not trivial activities if you think about them without the judgment. They may be a perfectly rational use of time by a different set of values. Maybe even a winning strategy.

And yet.

I can’t fully shake the feeling. Twelve hours of human time. Four minds. Whatever intelligence, curiosity, or capability sits inside those four people - all of it parked for three hours in service of a photo that will be seen for three seconds on a screen.

I don’t think this is about these specific women. It’s about something larger. We live in a moment where an enormous amount of human energy flows into the production of images of ourselves. Hours and hours every week, across hundreds of millions of people. The cumulative math is staggering.

I wonder sometimes what that energy could produce if it ran somewhere else. Not in a moralistic way - I’m not interested in telling anyone how to spend their afternoon. More in a curious way. What problems go unsolved, what ideas don’t get thought, what things don’t get built, because this is where the hours went instead.

Maybe nothing. Maybe the hours would just go somewhere else equally unproductive. Probably.

But still. Twelve hours. Gone, just like that.