On the hobby horse

Mentally, I'm here....

I have somehow been added to a WhatsApp group of touring middle-aged Wilderness Photography hobbyists this week.

They are on their way to the West Coast to capture the sights and I am enjoying all the updates, anonymously, from home. Thus far, we’ve covered off transport logistics and been through friendly introductions — name, home base, and a shared enthusiasm for the days ahead. They are discussing sunset plans. A nice man named Keith has made the journey all the way from Queensland.

Now, I don’t plan on lurking in the background of this innocuous chat for too much longer. It was never my intention to become the accidental voyeur. But the temptation to stay is backed by the very same thread that pulls me into writing.

To gather clues. To try and understand another point-of-view. To jump out of my own storyline for a minute, as I run the experiment to see just how easy it is to cross into another reality, particularly on these devices. That, and I just love people who commit themselves to curiosities so niche and all consuming it drives them to form community around it. Obsessive types are my obsession.

My Mum often likes to remind me of the early years her and Dad lived in this town. It was the 80s — the beginnings of the jet-boat, ski-field and bungy boom — and still functioning with sleepy infrastructure and a population far from what it is today. She tells me of a local phone circuit they used called the ‘party line’, which to my modern, digitally-literate ears sounds like one great big Group Chat, or a privacy infringement waiting to happen. On any given night, you could pick up your household’s chord-confined phone and settle in for a moment of eavesdropping if the network was already in use. Can you imagine it? A town so transparent and inclusive, that every act of remote communication was open (but not ethically encouraged) to the pricked and listening ears of others.

There is something so fun and liberating about faceless conversation. So ripe for inserting our perfectly imagined details into hyperbolic blind spots. But also so heartbreaking — evasive, unaccountable and anti-human. I once got embroiled in a confusing back and forth for 24 hours with a guy who had unknowingly been given the wrong mobile number by a girl he must’ve been connecting with on one of the apps. She’d fleeced him for attention and affirmation, then palmed him off to a random number when he’d suggested taking things offline, and now he was convinced to no end that my polite “who is this sorry?” responses were simply flirtatious banter.

Ha ha very funny, Sammy, was the tone that developed when I, Rosie, said I was in fact not joking and perhaps he had the wrong number. Next morning came and there he was again, but this time the penny dropped.

I’m confused. So you were not on Hinge?
You blonde?
You have children?
You live in Trentham?

Then an image of himself - a perfectly wholesome looking bloke - on the beach with his dog….“Have you seen this photo before?”
And the final blow of realisation: “Sorry, must have got cat-fished. Geeez, bloody web.”

I bring up this story to illustrate the point of the digital vs private self. How much we are willing to offer up. And, in the case of a cat-fish — or just a regular day on Instagram, how far we are willing to go to convince others of a life we may not really, truly inhabit in the material world.

What’s behind this fascination with knowing how everyone else is living their life? And how on earth has doing so with such scrupulousness become a favoured past-time?

A friend in Barcelona once told me when he used to live in the historic district in one of the more iconic looking apartment blocks, he’d often notice tourists watching him like a paid actor on his balcony. ‘Wow! Look! A real life Barcelonian hanging his washing before our very eyes!’

They romanticised his mundane.

But, I wonder if it isn’t all such a bad thing? Instead, using these tools in appropriate measure to galvanise our own ambitions — only after evaluating the real, sometimes ugly, impulse behind the need to latch on and compare with such intensity. Living back in the town where you grew up and bumping into people no longer actively within your orbit, you can almost feel the “how are you?” in passing as less of a genuine enquiry, and more of a way to tally up an internal score card. A collation of data points that form the ‘at least’, or ‘I wish’, or any other self-bolstering or self-berating comment your mind would like to offer up for the day. I’m guilty of it just as much.

Comparison is just what we do. It’s familiar, and it’s the quick hit we often need to make meaning of ourselves and our choices. And when it comes to life online, our supply is endless. But we all have our ‘thing.’ Behind closed doors we are here — awkward, vulnerable and eager to impress each other. So how can we go from passive watchers-on, absorbing and consuming at a rate so unnatural for our mighty but slow processing brains, to those with an increased surface area for realness. Nothing to hide. ‘Party line’ partial? Those of you who read my words regularly know I am certainly someone who missed the self-consciousness boat when it comes to divulging personal anecdotes. But for years now, I’ve carried around two rules for creative output and digital relations:

I reflect before I reveal.

I create before I consume.

Nothing too raw will ever make it on here. The magic must be retained, not diluted. The process loop must be completed before my story journeys through the perception of an audience and becomes a little less ‘mine.’

The notion of hobbies was called into question last year, when another friend asked how I was spending my free time in the city. Did I fill it with activities — a sketchbook, classes, sports? I had never really given it much thought, but in answering the question realised I struggled to pinpoint a legitimate, quantifiable avocation because my interest - my ‘hobby’ - had actually metastasised into my entire reason for being there. I was living inside it: Greece. Discovery. Geography. The great morass of peculiar and captivating people that walk this earth. I was spending my days, by workable standards, ‘hobby-less’, but saturating myself in the practice hours of ever-growing obsession. Capturing footage, sharing conversations with surprising strangers, building routine as I revisited the same locations, same faces, day in day out to observe how an enthusiasm can either rapidly escalate or naturally run out of steam. Perhaps I am a ‘Wilderness Photography’ hobbyist / do belong in the group chat after all?

With that, I think what my unexpected venture into middle age tour group communications and all these corresponding (wildly tangential) thoughts serve to address is this: our echo chambers need to be broken occasionally. Sometimes if we let our own edges bleed we become revolutionised. Others might not be our immediate preference, we may not ever understand their particular hype, but if we stay in the conversation for just a minute longer, maybe it could colour the gaps in our own appreciation for noticing what’s already around us.

Author Ali Smith put it perfectly in a bookshop talk I attended last May: she said in order to see more, and therefore feel more within your own life, catch yourself as you say things like “I’m walking down my road / X Street / known route.” Instead, change your mind dialogue to “here I am walking down ‘a’ road” she continued.

And then, watch as it all becomes entirely new.