If I could make a new year’s resolution for everyone in the English–speaking world, it would be that we all agree never to use the phrase ‘making memories’ again, or to think about life in terms of making memories, let alone post a photo with the hashtag #makingmemories.

All of a sudden, all across the internet, it seems to me, merchandise has sprung up encouraging us to think of life as a ‘memory–making’ project: frames, filters and albums designed to capture and enhance every breathing moment. There are mats for lying babies on next to their age in months for memory-making photoshoots, though none I’ve seen yet for the other end of life: look how Granny changed through her nineties! My friends now regularly comment on each other’s Christmas photos: ‘What lovely memories you’re making!’

I know it sounds unobjectionable but I find it frightening. It’s as if, under the influence of Apple Inc, we’ve started living not in the present but in some other tense, the future past, forever constructing a picture for later gratification; as if we’ve begun to imagine that the actual meaning of life is to record it. If I worked for Apple, I might suggest some sort of photo-based life scoring system: I think customers would like it. Nice set of Instagrammable breakfasts, but… where are the dogs playing in the surf? Only 7/10. Must make better memories.

The usual criticism of life as presented on social media is that it’s too curated, that people post only their most enviable moments. My issue with ‘making memories’ isn’t that the photos and videos are selective so much that they are fictitious. You cannot record life and live it properly at the same time. That’s just a fact. And if I feel strongly about it, it’s only because I’m riddled with guilt.

I don’t post on social media, but I still compulsively record my life. I have on my phone, for instance, a cracking set of Christmas photos of my family frolicking in Weardale, County Durham. The low and stormy sunlight catches the tips of the heather and a rainbow fills the sky, arching down beside my smiling son. If I were the posting sort, rather than the stalking sort, my online friends would imagine that before and after this magical shot, life had continued full of unself-conscious moorland fun. The reality was more like this: ‘Ceddy, stand there would you, no a bit to the left. Yes, I know it’s raining, but seriously, it’s not cold. Just a bit more to the left… love, please! It’s going to look so cool. If I give you a Polo, will you smile?’

As we pushed through the heather up to the summit’s cairn, I trailed behind, face in phone, cropping the rainbow photo, tinkering with its colours. ‘Mum! Stop looking at your phone!’ The pitiful cry of the 21st–century child.

Apple makes video montages for its users, clips of your own photos and video set to music. They’re disgusting but also irresistible. My husband and I watch them sometimes, sitting side-by-side grinning like a pair of old buzzards at footage of our son interspersed with the odd shot of a bank statement or a sofa that future algorithms will know to edit out. In a few days, the fraudulent rainbow shot will have slid into a making–memories montage, and I’ll have quite forgotten that events weren’t exactly as described. I imagine myself visited by an updated version of the Christmas Carol ghost who shows me a photo roll of real life as it would have looked to an observer: an endless series of me ogling at my phone.

And what is it all for? Who are those 15,000 photos saved in the iCloud for? I’m aware as I write of a faint feeling that this is a form of insurance policy; that wherever I wash up in my eighties, I’ll at least have an unending loop of fake memories for company. A simpler explanation is the obsession with ‘memory-making’ just provides us phone junkies with an opportunity for a fix. If you’re caught on a family walk looking at Facebook, a spouse is apt to become a little snappy. But who can complain if you’re simply making family memories?

If I ask my pals what their extensive photo archives are for, they say they’re for the kids. We were born in the pre-phone era, so most of us have, at best, just a few albums – pictures of pasty-looking children in hand-me-down shirts with pointed 1970s collars. Won’t it be wonderful for our own children to be able to scroll back through their lives and see photos or videos documenting almost every day?

I’m not so sure. It’s not that I don’t value the photos I have. But there are so few of them that they pose no threat to my own internal memories, and the older I get the more I value those. Real childhood memories haunt the edges of adult life. They involve the feel and smell of things: my mother’s dressing table and the smell of Elnett; floorboards creaking after dark. Real childhood memories are of close-up things: wallpaper, gravel, hands, cake. Memories made from an adult perspective have nothing to do with childhood.

Will a child brought up on a diet of recorded memories retain her own internal remembered past? I don’t see how they can quite. Even my generation sometimes find it hard to know if we remember the event or just a photo. The one affects the other, the same way the film of a favourite book erases the mental pictures you made reading it.

As I sit in cafés in London N1, I see parents appeasing their progeny by showing them snippets of themselves: this was you as a toddler, weren’t you cute? It’s strange to think that for Generation Alpha (that’s the post-Z lot), some of their earliest memories will be of looking at photos of themselves which their parents took in the interest of making memories.