Hey Disney friends, you might remember that last year I did a huge Disney trip, both coasts, back-to-back, the works. There were so many stops along the way that it honestly started to feel more like a Disney tour than a vacation. Ever since, I’ve been trying to put together the trip’s photo book, and I’ve run into one rather large problem: I took thousands of photos. And no, I’m not exaggerating. Between photos and videos, I have thousands of files sitting there waiting to be sorted through, and while I’ve been tackling it little by little, the whole process recently gave me one of those uncomfortable moments of self-awareness. Are we filming our Disney vacations more than we are actually living them?
Between content creators, family memories, blogs, TikToks, and trying to capture the ‘perfect’ shot, it feels like we are documenting every waking second of Disney magic now. Ten photos of the castle from the exact same angle, just in case one turns out slightly better. Recording entire rides we’ve already seen before. Snapping food photos before anyone is allowed to touch their plate. And somehow, even after all that, there’s still this lingering feeling that we didn’t capture enough. I do it too. I get so focused on freezing every moment in time that sometimes I wonder if I’m quietly trading away part of the experience of actually being there while it’s happening.
And honestly, I can’t even blame social media for this one. Much to the frustration of my inner circle, I barely posted anything from that trip online. Maybe two photos in total. So all of that visual note-taking wasn’t really for other people. It was for me. Sitting here now, though, I’m realizing that detail probably doesn’t matter at all. The habit still exists whether we post it or not. I’ve been lucky enough to visit Disney so many times that you’d think by now I’d already have every photo imaginable, but with children growing into young adults and every trip marking another little chapter in life, each photo suddenly feels irreplaceable. Future me wants every single one to hold onto forever.
Still, it comes at a cost. We are capturing the memories, but sometimes we aren’t fully inside them. We’re watching moments happen through a screen instead of simply letting them happen around us. And the strange part is, the clearest memories from that entire trip came from the one afternoon my phone battery died and I had forgotten my charger back at the resort. At the time, I thought I was missing out because I couldn’t take photos the way I normally would. No snapping every detail, no recording little moments, no documenting the perfect Disneyland afternoon. But looking back now, that stretch of time is actually where most of my strongest firsthand memories came from.
So the next time you’re in the Disney Parks, maybe give yourself permission to put the phone away for a little while. Not every ride needs to be filmed. Not every snack needs a photoshoot. Not every magical moment needs proof that it happened. Because as much as I treasure those photos sitting on my hard drive, it turns out the moments I remember most clearly were the ones where I stopped trying to capture everything and finally just let myself be there.
