In July 2023, I flew to meet my girlfriend for the first time. In her company, I felt at home in a way that I havenât felt since I was a child. In the same way the slightest whiff of a familiar scent can take you back twenty years to the place you last experienced it, she brought back a feeling of belonging that I had forgotten I had ever felt before, and I cried at the thought that I might forget it again.
Around the time I last remember feeling that way, I sat cross-legged in front of the TV and listened to Carl Sagan describe our consciousness as âa way for the Cosmos to know itselfâ. It is a beautiful description that has stayed with me ever since. As a message, its implications are so grand that I can't help but feel a responsibility to produce some kind of authentic output from my experiencesâsomething that I donât feel that I have done so far. We are each a completely different perspective through which the experience of being alive can be known; to not share our account of any of it seems selfish in that light.
Looking back through my twenties, I regret that there is no trace of what I was interested in at any given time or how it felt to be alive at that moment. More and more I feel sad that I have left so little in the way of reminders in my wake. Even in my regret, I flip regularly between responsibility and apathy. On the one hand, I am a unique and ever-changing configuration of particles that were formed in some dying stars billions of years ago that has, against all odds, developed self-awareness and the ability to find the most ordinary things meaningful. But on the other hand, I have nothing interesting or profound to say, and I will always be the product of my experiences, whether I consciously remember them or not.
This cognitive dissonance has arisen out of a period in my life where I am both increasingly sentimental about the meaningful experiences I have and increasingly fearful that I will not be able to remember them as long as I would like to. I'm worried that, as technology takes over and I am bombarded with information faster than I can process it, I'm leaving too much of what I remember of my experience down to what is coincidentally captured through photographs and messages, which, in turn, leaves my overwhelmed memory free to forget meaningful things it might otherwise have remembered.
It has been a long time since I felt that the public internet is an appropriate place to share anything; I don't use social media and haven't for a good while, for all the obvious reasons and many more regarding the authenticity and usefulness of the environments those platforms encourage. The internet outside of those places feels different now, too. In becoming so intimately intertwined with our real lives, it has, for the most part, sadly succumbed to all the egotistical and societal bollocks that it felt immune to in its relative infancy.
I've been inspired by personal websites a lot lately. Ones that are born out of a desire to at least reclaim the sense of excitement and humanity that characterised the old internet. Reading them has made me feel homesick for the internet I grew up onâone where people just posted shit they cared about and were interested in. They've served as a reminder that I can try to get back to that too.
This website is for remembering and for having a small home on the internet once again.