I want to talk about the feeling that comes when you pull out old photos.

There are moments when you accidentally come across old photos while organizing a photo album.

It's both heartwarming and familiar, yet strangely, a sharp pain accompanies it.

It's hard to explain that feeling accurately, and often you just sigh and move on.

However, what's strange is that we don't bother to remove those photos that evoke such uncomfortable feelings.

We leave them there. This point is quite interesting. It makes you think about why humans repeat this behavior.

Humans are the only beings that are aware of time. We recognize at this moment that the present will soon become the past.

This awareness can be seen as the reason we created the tool of photography. We don't take pictures just because a moment is beautiful; we document it because we know that moment will disappear.

Perhaps it's closer to a fear of loss than love. That's why we capture even the mundane moments and preserve scenes that seem insignificant.

So why do we feel both joy and sadness when looking at old photos?

It's often called nostalgia, but within it lies the desire to go back and the reality of not being able to.

Human memory does not store facts as they are. We edit our memories. Difficult moments, boring feelings, and minor conflicts are mostly deleted, leaving only the brightest scenes. Thus, the past we recall is not the actual past but an edited version.

The problem is that the present self always feels inferior to that edited past.

This moment will likely be a good memory in a few years. Yet, we cannot feel that truth right now. Humans have a tendency to undervalue the present and overvalue the past.

This is not a deliberate choice but almost instinctual. So even a day that feels insignificant now will be remembered as a decent moment later.

The reason we can smile while looking at photos and suddenly feel bittersweet is not simply because we are emotionally rich. It's because we instinctively realize that we can do nothing in the face of the flow of time. Photos are not just images; they are records.

They are evidence that moments that once clearly existed have now disappeared. Therefore, they contain both warmth and coldness.

Yet, we continue to take photos. Even knowing that they will eventually fade away, we preserve them.

This behavior may seem inefficient and perhaps a bit foolish. But it reflects a very human aspect. There's a determination to hold on to what we know will disappear and a persistence to document it.

Ultimately, what we love may not be the memory itself but the self that exists within that memory.

That's why we can't delete photos. They contain the past versions of ourselves. The version of me that seems a little more radiant than now, or the version of me that cannot return to that state, is something we find hard to let go of.

So today, we take photos again. We save even the ordinary days and seemingly meaningless moments.

Even knowing what emotions will arise when we look back later. Perhaps being human means embracing this contradiction.