The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. This week’s issue is written by Tacey Rychter, an audience editor and writer with the Australia bureau.

I was hiking with a friend along the sandstone cliffs of Royal National Park, south of Sydney, on a weekend, when we noticed a guy balancing precariously on a thin rock shelf jutting out high above the ocean. The second his mate snapped a picture, I spotted a pair of humpback whales surfacing beneath them.

They both missed the stunning moment, completely. And O.K. for a second, I felt the tiniest bit smug about it.

Don’t get me wrong — this isn’t a morality tale about how phones are ruining our lives, because then I remembered I had dozens of pictures on my phone of the very same hike (including a dorky selfie with an unimpressed kookaburra).