On the lookout overlooking my local beach, there are locks on the fence. We've seen these before all over the world, on fences and on bridges. I've never really understood what they are for. Some of them are carved or engraved, little memories perhaps of love and death. I wonder who starts them. As soon as one person puts up a lock, does the next person and so on until it becomes a thing?

I want to come with an angle grinder and cut them all off.

I don't really understand why we have to leave some kind of evidence of our passing everywhere we go. I've written about this before with rock stacks. I'm the one that kicks them down.

So you're at the beach building what you think is this work of art that you photograph, a stack of rocks interrupting the view. And we know it's not the best thing to do because it disturbs the hiding places of insects and small animals and bacteria and so on. We shouldn't really be interrupting this natural environment for our own dubious artistic vision. I guess if you're going to do it for some therapy, fine, but please pull it down when you leave.

But I guess people leave locks on fences, stack rocks, carve names into trees, and spray graffiti for a lot of the same reasons. They want to feel visible, to leave proof they existed, to attach themselves to a moment and say, I was here.

Maybe it's anxiety about impermanence. Nature reminds people how temporary they are. Vast beaches and oceans dwarf us, so people respond by trying to leave some kind of mark of permanence like locks or rock stacks or graffiti. It's what we do - sometimes we come across graffiti dated between the wars, for example, and there is even evidence of such graffiti in places like Pompeii.

A friend of mine used to work as a senior instructor at a meditation centre. At this place, you had to meditate thirteen hours a day, and the rest of the time you'd be able to walk around the perimeter. She always said that people couldn't help creating art even if they were meant not to distract themselves. Every day it was her job to go around and pull down little stacks of rocks or mobiles made of feathers and sticks. People had to create, this irrepressible urge to turn thoughts into action, existence into permanence.

Maybe that's what bothers me - untouched nature disappearing beneath the weight of human desires to be seen, to be permanent - at the expense of how others feel about nature. I don't think anyone thinks about the person that comes along after them, that wants this beautiful environment where they love the fact it's untouched. It's something we can get lost in to get away from people and the stresses of the world, a reminder that we are part of nature, and that's comforting.

It really bugs me that people play loud music, for example, at a campsite. Of course I know that I'm not perfect, that I lay footprints in the sand as well. But I'd like to think that I just don't put my name on everything or a lock on a fence because everybody else does, or that I'm doing it to feel permanence in the broader truth of a life that is absolutely impermanent.