They say to live in the moment, I know, but in my 24 years on this planet, I truly cannot think of a single moment in which I have successfully lived—save for, potentially, the first time I did shrooms and stared at a Cy Twombly painting in The Met until my third eye opened. No matter where I am or what I’m doing, I am eternally preoccupied by my own failure to experience “properly.” My memory has never been something to write home about, and lately that’s been compounded by the gnawing, sharp-toothed fear that I’ll grow old and remember none of the life I’ve lived. I find myself so focused on the concept of “experiencing the moment” that I forget to experience anything at all; everything passes by in one quick blur, the peaks and valleys of life flattened into a single straight line by my own counterproductive self-consciousness. It’s an unfortunate way to live, and despite myriad attempts to solve it with meditation and medication alike, I have yet to find a way of shaking it.
The best I can do, then, is document. I’ve become a hoarder of experience—of material proof of a life lived. I can’t bring myself to throw away ticket stubs or receipts. I’m incapable of getting rid of clothes. Gun to my head, you couldn’t make me clear out my Photos app. The greatest luxury I allow myself is my iPhone storage. I shell out an untold amount of cash to keep as many photos and videos as possible: I currently have 144,744 photos and 13,556 videos on my phone, which has 512 GB of storage. I’m not kidding. It costs a fortune.
Documenting, at this point, has become borderline compulsive. If I don’t take a photo of a painting, I may as well not have seen it. If I don’t record a song, the band may as well not have played it. If I don’t immediately log my opinion on a film, I may as well not have watched it. There’s a relief that comes with the act—now, my phone does the work of remembering for me. Of course, that doesn’t mean I automatically start successfully living in the present, but it does help me get closer to it.
I know the natural reaction to all this might be: “Okay, then you’re not the person you’re talking about when we complain about phones at shows. You clearly have your own problems to deal with.” That’s probably true to some extent, but part of me wonders how much of this is generational. My friends and I live on our phones; those younger than us even more so. Who’s to say this pervasive, passive dread that preoccupies my every waking thought isn’t, to some degree, universal? I’m surely not the only one for whom experience feels less real without proof. With photo- and video-based apps becoming our primary form of social interaction and cultural engagement, I’d imagine this feeling is only getting more common, despite being largely alien to the generations before me. After all, my peers and I have literally grown up offloading our memories onto devices. I’d be shocked if that somehow didn’t change how we remember, how we think about experience itself.
Evidence, if anecdotal: last summer, I went to a Pixies show that skewed, let’s say, demographically older. A room full of dads in their fifties (mine included), who’d grown up on Doolittle and still owned the vinyl. Looking around, I clocked almost no phones in the air—not a policy, just an organic absence. It would be easy to read this as a generational virtue gap, proof that the olds simply know how to be present in a way the youngs do not. I think it’s more structural. Those men grew up trusting their own memory out of pure necessity—they didn’t have the failsafe we did. They didn’t spend their adolescence cataloguing their lives in Stories, and they didn’t develop the baseline anxiety that an undocumented experience is somehow a lesser one. They didn’t learn to treat the camera as a necessary intermediary between themselves and the things they love. But I grew up with a hard drive in my pocket. I don’t remember what it’s like to walk through life without feeling its weight.
But when “Where Is My Mind” kicked off as the final song, the twenty-somethings scattered throughout the crowd revealed themselves: phones went up. (Not me, though; I got my keepsake video during “Monkey Gone to Heaven.”) Of course, the big hits are always the most-clipped, because they’re the only ones some showgoers actually know—or, perhaps, the ones the social media masses are most likely to know, and all those showgoers with their phones up are, in fact, recording to post.
OBVIOUSLY, THERE’S NO WORLD in which social media is irrelevant to the phones-at-shows phenomenon, and I don’t mean to downplay its impact. But in all likelihood, my own view on posting concert videos online is skewed by the kind of shows I attend: small ones, often by artists most people haven’t heard of—sometimes my own friends, or friends of friends. Over the past six months, I’ve started posting videos of every set I see to my Instagram story, openers and headliners alike. This is largely a promotional act: I like this band, and you should too. Sometimes the reason I take more videos than I initially intended to is that I want to showcase the band at their absolute best—and, shit, this song is better than the last one, or might come across better over video. It’s all done in the hopes that at least one person sees it and decides to check them out.
A friend and I recently talked about how discouraging phones at shows is a luxury. Harry Styles can ban devices and hand out disposable cameras. Bruno Mars can enforce a no-phones policy on his world tour, Jack White can stuff phones in Yondr pouches, and Billie Eilish can urge her fans to turn their devices off. Smaller bands cannot. Social media isn’t just connection; it’s often the most viable path to success in 2026. It doesn’t matter how much you hate seeing phones at your performances when going viral might be the difference between making rent and not. Only the top 1% of artists can afford to disavow that kind of organic promotion.
But for most attendees, social clout does, of course, play a role. Hell, I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t post a clip of a Sabrina Carpenter show on my story, and she sure as shit doesn’t need my promotion. There’s a reason phones come out during a band’s most popular song, “Where Is My Mind”-style: they’re the most recognizable part of a show. Social media is a marketplace, and this is a kind of currency. I felt very real FOMO watching mutuals post videos of Coachella, and I’ve never even wanted to go to Coachella before. Those stock-still, phone-brandishing Madonna crowds did their job.
That motive, and the people driven exclusively by it, undoubtedly exist. I’m not denying that. But I’m just not convinced that they’re the majority. The discourse tends to imagine a clear villain: the checked-out Gen Z-er with the hollow stare, the TikTok-brained teenager who’d rather get a hit post about a concert than actually experience it. But when I asked my Instagram followers about their recording habits in a survey the other day, I got an overwhelming number of responses telling me not about social media, but about the fear of forgetting. The only replies I received along the lines of “I never feel compelled to record, and I wish others didn’t either” all came from people at least a decade older. Some Gen Z peers brought up the issue of FOMO, too—in-person FOMO, not even the online variety. If everyone is recording but you, you are the only person without proof that you were there. Everyone else gets to relive it but you. That’s how you get a Coachella crowd of hundreds of faces hidden behind phone screens. There’s power in numbers. If everyone is recording, the shame belongs to no one in particular. Everyone is guilty, so no one is.
The impulse to record is not new; arguably, it’s been around as long as the desire to remember. What is new is accessibility: we hardly leave the house without some means of recording our lives in hand. And now that we all have access, an unspoken hierarchy of sorts has coagulated: some forms of capturing are more legitimate than others. The difference between an audiophile bootlegging a show on cassette and a girl capturing a song on her phone by the barricade is mostly aesthetic, mostly about what the person recording looks like from the outside. Aadam Jacobs, if he were young today, would almost certainly be in the latter’s camp—again, out of the sheer accessibility of the iPhone. He’d be at the show documenting like the rest of us: not out of shallowness, not out of clout-chasing, but out of the same hunger that drove him to steal his grandmother’s dictation device in 1984. You don’t produce 10,000 tapes for nothing. You do it to say, “I was there. This happened. This was real.” And, now, Internet Archive volunteers are carefully digitizing those tapes in the hopes of sating everyone else’s hunger, too.
Is that hunger selfish? I think it depends. In Jacobs’ case, probably not. In my case? Almost certainly. Someone I know—from a generation above me—responded to my prompt on Instagram: “How do you think people would respond if the artist said, ‘You must check your phone at the door, but if you register your phone with us before the show, you will receive amazing keepsake photos/videos from the show that will be 1000x better than anything you could take on your phone?’” His answer was easy: I would make that trade in a heartbeat. I was mildly horrified to realize that I wouldn’t. I don’t want press photos; I don’t want professional recordings sent out on a listserv. I want my shitty, shaky, 29-second videos taken behind a guy too tall to justify standing this close to this barricade. I want to cringe at the way my own voice sounds when I cheer or sing along. I want the singers to be slightly out of frame because I’m dancing and not looking at the positioning of my phone, squarely on the lighting rig instead of the band. I guess I’m not Aadam Jacobs, doing archival work for the masses. I’m doing archival work for myself.
I don’t love this about myself. I don’t want to be part of the problem, caught with my phone up and my pants metaphorically down—part of a world where experience has become too entangled with the documentation of it to cleanly parse. I don’t want any artist to feel like I’m not engaged with them or their work. I worry, though, that that is just the way I’ve learned to engage. The question, then: what does unlearning look like? I don’t think I have an answer.
Last Saturday, I saw The Last Dinner Party at Hammerstein Ballroom—an incredible show through and through, Abigail Morris singing her damn heart out for ninety minutes straight. A pair of middle school girls danced in front of me the whole time, screaming along to every word; surprisingly, their phones stayed in their backpacks the whole time. This was not the case for most of the crowd. Morris stopped the set before the final song, and asked, breathless and smiling, if it would be possible to do this last track—“Nothing Matters,” the band’s biggest hit—with no phones at all; just everyone dancing and connecting with the people around them. After a beat, she quickly walked back her initial request, amending it to include that if you really, really needed to, you could record during the final chorus. But please, she said. Just one song.
People seemed to oblige. I watched phones disappear into pockets. I slipped my own into my cheap fake-leather purse. The band started to play. I felt the room shift slightly, loosen. Then, before the first chorus fully resolved, a phone went up near the barricade. Then another. Both were held by girls who hadn’t, it seemed, made any kind of conscious decision to defy Morris—they’d simply arrived at the point where the pull of the moment became stronger than the social contract of the ask. They both looked ashamed and awkward, almost constipated with it, but reassured by each other’s presence—a connection forged through joint guilt. The band kept playing. The girls kept recording. When the song ended, they cheered louder than anyone.
Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
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