I timed the conclusion of my martini for exactly 8:05 pm. I sat at the lobby bar of the Algonquin hotel. Two women from Texas sat next to me. One, a woman named Nora from Dallas, was already a few sheets to the wind. The scent of juniper mingled with her sweet perfume. Rocco was at the piano playing “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” His voice was particularly raspy. I took my final swig, nibbled my 3rd olive, and bid Michael, the bartender, adieu. I walked two blocks from the Algonquin down to 42nd Street and 6th Avenue where already throngs of people blocked the street. Policemen tried to make sense of the chaos to no avail. Manhattanhenge was coming and thousands of people needed their pic.
8:14 pm arrived and I took in the sight. The sun moved into position: nestled perfectly in the valley of skyscrapers that line Midtown streets. A cool evening breeze moved through the spring air. The smell of charred meat wafted to me in a smokey cloud from a food stand on the corner near Bryant Park. As the sun slid down the horizon I walked to 41st Street where even more people held up their phones toward the sun as though it were the biggest pop star on earth performing their biggest hit. The masses each framing the event on their devices, captured for future broadcast across social media and to occupy space in their cloud for eternity. A screen between their eyes and the magic of spring in New York City before them.
I understand the instinct. I myself have an almost embarrassing number of sunsets captured in my photos app. Several of my own from just that evening. Some are spectacular, some laughable. Many I couldn’t place without the metadata—no context—just the sun moving past a mountain, shimmering off a tall building, or sinking into an oceanic horizon. There is a persistent struggle playing out in these moments. To be present: to exist in the now; to feel the sun on my skin, the salt in the air; listen for the sound of waves crashing on the shore; encode it in my senses. Or reach for my phone: curate my experience for future consumption; capture the moment forever and share it with the world. The tension: experience the moment or step outside of it and preserve it for posterity.
It isn’t a simple choice and there are plenty of times where they might be able to coexist. But I find something profoundly sad in outsourcing the act of memory making to our devices. I can take a photo but it won’t capture the smell of charred beef. The heat emanating off the thousands of bodies around me. If I am not immersed in the experience, then do I become a documentarian instead of a participant? I observe instead of feel. Removed.
If I am an observer and not a participant, do I even need to be there? There were thousands of other people all holding their phones up to capture the same moment—8:14pm, May 28th, 2026, at that location, 6th Avenue between 40th and 42nd Street looking west toward the Hudson. In viewing the event through my phone, the moment is flattened. It is observed through a screen, something I could have done watching a live stream or later scrolling Instagram. There have also been so many of these photos that I could easily manufacture the scene with a few prompts into any AI photo generation tool.
Sitting here today I can feel the moments leading up to Manhattanhenge. The crisp taste of my martini and the feel of condensation from the glass on my skin. Nora laughing as Michael refills her Gin & Tonic. The vibrations of Rocco pounding the keys. I feel like Proust did his madeleine. My body thrust back in time, awash in experience. The involuntary memory: a moment that had been lost to him but one that he had experienced so fully it returned to him with immense force and broke open a flood of emotion.
In stepping out of moments to capture them am I depriving myself of re-experiencing it so deeply in the future? There is something beautiful in the spontaneous recall of a moment fully lived. One encoded in my body and not just cataloged on my device. And not just my phone. Thousands of phones. The photo on my phone is going to be 99% the same as the person next to me and the person next to them. The photo won’t have the context of the evening that led up to it, but will be transmitted around the world. It will be consumed by LLMs and be used to recreate that moment again and again. The uniqueness of my experience gone.
What do I have then when the experiences that I choose to contain within the dimensions of my phone screen can be generated with extreme precision without my physical participation. I could generate a photo of a sunset, put it in my camera roll, indistinguishable from all the rest. But when I pull it up there will be no smile, no recollection of the day. No meaning or memory made. I am left with just a listless artifact, no true human context.
I am not trying to set up a false dichotomy, that a life well documented is antithetical to a life well experienced. There can and should be a blend of the two. Maybe my concern isn’t the photos, but in the spontaneity, the surprise. Because it is the surprises that tend to get coded into our bodies as sensations. The things we remember the most are those things that pull us out of the plan. The things that jar us out of our habit. The sunset was spectacular even if it didn’t feel quite as special. But those moments right before? The texture resides fully in my senses.
The other night I stopped into the Algonquin and ordered a martini. The room was quiet, no Rocco at the piano, no women from Texas tipsy at the bar. Michael was pouring a glass of wine for a man I later discovered was from San Diego. But I sipped my drink, overheard that the man was going to see The Outsiders. The same show Nora and her friend were off to see the night of Manhattanhenge. And it all washed over me again. Nora’s perfume. Rocco’s rasp. Condensation against my fingertips. After a while I closed my tab and walked back out onto the street. It was quieter and the sun had already set. When I got to 42nd Street a man with his wife and children paused to take a picture of the bright city lights a block away at Times Square. I nodded at him and inhaled the smoke of charred beef emanating from a food cart near Bryant Park.
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