I was about to be publicly humiliated again, and there was nothing I could do about it.

On one very specific day each year—usually when I was sick or had a gnarly pimple— my image would be immortalized. Printed in its full and awkward glory, and then distributed to my best friend, my bully, and my childhood crush.

At the time, I couldn’t envision a more embarrassing hell.

This was, of course, class picture day. And just about every picture of mine looked like this.

Each year, my worst day was frozen in time.

And for the proceeding 365 days, I felt like an idiot. Mostly because I knew, the picture they had captured wasn’t me. Instead, it was just a single moment in time, masquerading around, as if it were the real me.

I felt helpless. If I was only given more space on the yearbook page, I could somehow show people I wasn’t just an awkward dork! If only I were given a chance to make my case, I knew I could persuade the other students that I was indeed a worthy friend.

Most of all, class pictures hurt because they made me acutely aware of what I was not. I wasn’t a handsome athlete. I wasn’t desirable. I was just an awkward pre-pubescent nerd.

And this picture, year after year, was proof.

A new kind of torture

And then, one day, I grew up.

My pictures weren’t awkward anymore. My head wasn’t a teetering golfball on the end of a bendy straw. Dare I say, my snapshots were looking good.

But something was still wrong.

I had freed myself from the tyranny of the school yearbook photographer, only to swap him for a new oppressor. And this time, they would be far less forgiving.

The New Snapshot

I started working when I was 14 years old.

My family owned a Mexican restaurant, so as soon as I was legally able to, I started cleaning toilets, and deep frying tortilla chips. It wasn’t glamorous, but I was making $175 a week. That may not sound like a lot, but it was $175 more than any of my friends were making, so I might as well have been Jeff Bezos.

I continued making this kind of money, and doing odd service jobs well into college.

But one night, after a rough shift grilling hamburgers until 4am, I decided I wanted a normal job. One that I could clock in and out of at normal times. One that I could wear nice clothes to. One that would require me to use my brain power, instead of my body power.

So I drafted up my first real-deal resume.

And that’s when I encountered him for the second time. The same picture-snapping bastard who took terrible photos of me as a kid. But this time he wasn’t making me look like an idiot in front of my high school crush. Rather, he was killing my chances at getting a job.

Lights, camera, and…….SNAP!

This was not flattering.

Just like my yearbook pictures, this snapshot flattened me out. It took the complexities of who I was, and reduced them down to a single Word document. My hobbies, my relationships, my aspirations, and my character, all discarded.

The color of my experiences had been drained. This snapshot was only focused on the critical details. And as it turns out, I was lacking just about every one of them.

It was just as humiliating as when I was a kid. If I only had more space to plead my case. If I only had a chance to explain.

The Problem With Snapshots

When we reduce people to a single moment in time, we have to make a judgement call. We have to determine which information is relevant, and which should be thrown away.

In the name of convenience, we take the complexity and richness of an entire human life, and distill it down to a handful of easily sortable criteria. By doing this, we overlook two very important things.

The first is that, people are dynamic and multidimensional. 

We each have families, relationships, careers, spirituality, and health to contend with every day. When we flatten that down, everything that doesn’t fit the search criteria is eliminated.

The second thing is that, everyone has a future.

There’s a myth we all seem to believe, that goes a bit like this:

When looking back on the past decade, we can see that we’ve changed radically. But when we flip the arrow of time—peering 10 years into the future—we view ourselves as more or less the same.

Maybe we’re in better shape.

Maybe we have a bit more money or success.

But our personality, our beliefs, and our friends will certainly all remain the same…

But that’s ridiculous. As a species, we’re defined by our dynamism. The only time we stop changing, is when we are dead.

People have the capacity to surprise you.

The absolute worst thing about a snapshot is that, it’s a single moment from your past, brought into the present. It’s a representation of who you were. That representation is then used to stand in for who you are, and who you have the capacity to become. 

It’s like looking at your life through a pinhole.

By peeping through, people can only see the smallest fraction of what makes you, you. They miss most of your successes and failures, your triumphs and heartbreaks. Instead, they only see what is visible through a tiny aperture.

And if they don’t like what they see, that’s just too bad.

This is why, online dating is so demoralizing.

The question of, “is this person worthy of my love?” is being answered by a series of checkboxes. If you missed the bathing suit pic, or the Ivy League school, you might as well kiss your prospects of starting a family goodbye.

And that’s unfair, because you have a bigger story to tell.

Your past is not your future

When you hear that your friend’s marriage is falling apart, you immediately start creating hypothetical scenarios. You start looking for fault.

The same thing for when your job applications get denied, or when your family member gets diagnosed with cancer. There must be a reason, and it’s your job to find out why.

But unfortunately, that’s not how life actually works.

Time and again, the conclusions derived from trying to map our past to our future, fall flat. Our lives are simply too interconnected, too multivariate, and too complex to neatly predict.

So when the judgmental eyes of society look upon your past and see failures, they assume your future will yield more of the same.

But, you are not your past, and you are not a snapshot. You are a charming, dynamic, and three-dimensional being—with hobbies, aspirations, and character. All of which are in constant flux.

The reality is, although you might have had some failures in your past, your future probably looks a lot more like this.

Snapshots hurt

We’ve all felt the pain of indifference, whether that be from a romantic partner or a potential employer.

That feeling of helplessness—like if you were only given the chance to share your story—you know could make them love you.

Knowing that if you were just in better shape, you’d probably be in a relationship. Or if you just went to a better school, you probably would have gotten a call back for that job. 

When a snapshot is taken of you, and your life is being sorted and swiped, you are subject to all of these terrible emotions.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

People are thrilling, soulful, and complex.

At its best, creating snapshots frees up a bit more of our time. It’s one less step we need to take when making a judgement call on someone.

But at its worst, snapshots create two worlds. A world for those who decide to play the game, and cater to the sorting criteria. And another, for those who must live as ghosts. Unseen by employers, friends, and romantic partners. They have been sorted out of society.

At the extreme, this fosters a level of homogeneity in the world that we have yet to see. An overwhelming, and all encompassing same-ness.

The answer to combat the snapshot, like so many things, isn’t clean.

It isn’t a new formula, or algorithm. Instead, it’s the same human messiness that we’ve been doing for over 100 millennia. It’s called, talking to people. 

By talking to people face-to-face, we can share a bit of our spark with them. A bit of our personality, our drive, our aspirations, and dreams. We can give them a more wholistic view into what makes us the person we are.

Sharing our successes and failures, in a format the allows us to tell the whole story.

Although this is certainly not efficient or scalable, it is uniquely human. And in the realm of social interaction, there is no tool more powerful.

Through conversation, we can inspire others to imagine, and to reflect. We can paint a picture of who we can become, even when the data—and the snapshot—doesn’t back it up. We can give them a reason to believe in us.

We can go on dates, without doing a full background check. Considering a life partner based on their potential, instead of their past.

We can interview for jobs that we don’t yet check every box. Knowing that we can grow into a role, and have the capacity for radical change.

By talking to people, we cross the barrier of cold, mechanical sorting, and into the world of humanity and collaboration. One where our potential shines brighter than our past. Where we are seen as dynamic, and capable of change.

People take chances on people, not on checkboxes. And when people take chances, the whole world starts looking a bit different.

—Zac