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 haven’t felt since I was a child. In the same way the slightest hint of a familiar scent can take you back twenty years to the place you last experienced it, with her I felt a sense of belonging that I had forgotten I had ever felt before.
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 ‘a way for the Cosmos to know itself’. 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 experiences. We are each a completely different perspective through which the experience of being alive can be known, and to not record our account of any of it seems like a waste.
Lately I have been increasingly sentimental about the meaningful experiences I have, and increasingly fearful that I won’t be able to remember them as long as I would like to. I'm worried that technology seeping in to every aspect of my life and bombarding me with information faster than I can process it is causing me to forget meaningful experiences I might otherwise have remembered.
Looking back through my twenties, I regret that I left so little in the way of reminders of what I was interested in, or how it felt to be alive at that moment, but I still flip regularly between responsibility and apathy depending on how sentimental I’m feeling — I’m a unique and ever-changing configuration of particles that were formed in some dying stars billions of years ago who has nothing interesting to say.
The internet hasn’t felt like an appropriate place to share anything personal for a long time. I don't use social media and haven't for a good while, but the internet outside of those places feels different too. In becoming so intimately intertwined with our real lives, it has, for the most part, sadly succumbed to all the egotistical bollocks that it provided a welcome escape from in its infancy.
Still, I've been inspired by small personal websites lately. Ones that try 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 on — one where people just posted things they cared about and were interested in.
This website is for remembering and for having a small home on the internet.