I never took photos of ordinary life, only holidays
I had this rule I never actually stated out loud, more of a habit really. Camera comes out when something is happening. And for years I had a fairly confident idea of what that meant. Christmas. Beach holidays. Graduation. The camera stayed in the bag otherwise. I think I told myself it was about not being precious, not being one of those people who photographs their lunch. But actually I think it was more like I had this model in my head of what counted as a memory worth keeping and it was basically a highlights reel, a kind of mental JPEG compression where you throw out everything that isn't a peak moment. Which is, I now think, a deeply stupid model. But it made sense at the time and I never questioned it. I had a 16GB SD card with maybe four hundred photos on it going back six years. Mostly the same five or six types of occasion. There were whole years in there that were basically one birthday dinner and a week in Portugal.
I don't know if there is a lesson exactly. I think I built a mental model that was wrong and I used it consistently for a long time and by the time I understood why it was wrong the cost was already there. The model said: ordinary moments don't need recording. They'll always be there. But they won't always be there, obviously. Nothing is always there. I knew that abstractly. I know lots of things abstractly that don't seem to change my behaviour. I think the thing I actually took from it is more uncomfortable than a lesson, it's more like, I had a preference for not seeing something and I organised my habits around that preference and I called the habit something neutral like I just don't photograph mundane stuff and that made it easier not to look at what I was actually doing.