Just now I was watching this instagram video that appeared randomly in my feed, and it was a comparison bettwen the same city, but going around in 1999 and 2026. The aesthetics of the 90’s cameray gave it a gloomy, blurry and even muddy look, compared to the clean and bright camera of the new phones, but somwhat that sketchy old video somewhat felt more… alive?
The description was written as: “In 1999 we had no cell phones, no group chats, no snapchat… just driving around aimlessly looking…”
And seeing the video more than once, the guys going into the gas station, the blurry lights, the gray-ish color scheme and poor stabilization of the camera, also I noticed something more. As it was a friday night, that place in particular, the store of the gas station in particular was acutually packed with people just chilling and minding their own business, chatting, and plainright having a good time.
Cassettes and CDs at display, renting movies to go out and have a good time at night, meeting with friends, the fellow “Third Places” which a few people have said most of us have lost with the advent of internet things, and plain obsolecence of stuff. Blockbuster’s gone. Now we have Netflix. Chilling out at a random place and meet some random people… well, not so gone, but now you can just open an app and order delivery food easier than never.
Somehow, with technology advancements and the gripes of society, we’ve lost something deeper, those fade away memories that now we can retrieve and look into the internet as if gazing into an obscure alien world, that was not so very far away from the reality we live in now… We gaze into the liveliness of what was like to get into contact with others more often, to have places which we could go and be there, besides just home and work…
And giggles funny enough, now even work we don’t have a place for anymore! It’s all together at home, after the Covid pandemic hit. 6 years onwards and we look with nostalgia for things and people, places, situations we’ve never met or never been to, but…. I wish I could have.
I still can, if I so want to, but it just feels weird. I can’t just call up my buddies right away and expect them to be available to hang out on a friday night. Most of them now have kids, some are married, and then… If some random possibility surges of us meeting anytime, it has to be scheduled with weeks prior.
Also, after graduating, you don’t have the same “space” you had while an undergrad (or while at high-school), in which you could constantly meet the same people, day-in, day-out, and just decide “let’s go there!”. Now we have schedules. Now we have duties, and debit cards to make the bill at the end of the month (if we can barely afford it nowadays even).
We have lost something far deeper, we have lost freedom, that we didn’t even conceive that existed in such a form. The freedom of the materiality and other people hanging around where you’d know they could be. The freedom of not helving your attention sucked to portable devices and fucking up with your brain. We have lost the sheer will to just be somewhere without having the constant nagging and dragging feeling that we need to feel that space and time somehow…
And seeing those videos, feels, weird, and feels comfortable, looking that a few people, for a brief glimpse in time into this world, could afford to live such existences. Of course, there are far more urgent matters at hand pressing our world now, terminality of the ecological frontier, the wars waging on, economic instability, fertility rates…
I wonder, really… if… If maybe some of the other options would be to stop looking onwards and keep looking backwards, longing for that which was once and might not ever come to be again. To lock ourselves in periodically into 1999 or some other yesteryear, just for the sake of it, while we watch politicians and the lake make our world crash and burn…
But even if we leave it like so…. what will be of those to come? As for us, that we had such opportunity to experience that glimpse in time in the 90’s, what about…. What about the next few generations? After the Alphas, the Gammas, the Charlies, the Zetas… IF we just leave things as they are, what will there be?
Just… blurred memories? Accessed through a technological background instilling an emotional endeavour which would never flourish into full grasp? Would that… Would that even be called life in any case?
Things to think about, folks…
Oh, in case you’re wondering about the video and the like, look for IG’s Channel: memory.lane.project
The video URL is: instagram.com/p/DWIVT4NjOuO
That’s it for today guys,
Have a good one.
Paece.