The diary of almost everything

Last week there was an eclipse, and today, while I was getting coffee, one of the girls behind the counter asked whether I’d seen it. I told her I hadn’t because I was at Pilates, which is apparently the sort of sentence I say now, but added that it didn’t really matter because I’d already seen one in 1999.

There was a brief pause.

They looked at me. I looked at them. And somewhere between those two looks I remembered that the girls making my coffee are somewhere between seventeen and nineteen, which means that in 1999 they weren’t busy watching an eclipse, going to school or doing anything else particularly memorable.

They hadn’t been born yet.

There are many ways to become aware of your own age, but casually mentioning an event you remember clearly to someone who wouldn’t exist for another eight years is particularly efficient.

The annoying thing is that 1999 doesn’t feel very long ago to me. It certainly doesn’t feel historical. I can remember where I was, what life looked like and the general feeling of that time without having to dig particularly deep. Yet apparently I have now reached the age where I can tell stories beginning with “I remember in 1999” to actual adults who look at me in much the same way I once looked at people who talked about the seventies.

I drank my coffee and recovered. Mostly.
But it did make me think about something I’ve been noticing online lately. Instagram has apparently decided that people around forty are emotionally vulnerable to grainy footage, synthesizers and supermarkets from 1994, and unfortunately its research appears to be excellent.

My feed keeps showing me those AI generated videos of life in the eighties and nineties. A kid riding a bicycle home as the streetlights come on, someone wandering around a shopping mall, a family sitting in a living room with an enormous television, or a teenager lying on a bed doing absolutely nothing while a fan turns slowly in the corner. There’s always that particular music underneath it that makes the whole thing feel like a memory you’ve just found in a box in the attic.
And somehow it works….

I’ll be watching a completely fabricated Tuesday afternoon in 1994 and feel an unexpected little ache of recognition, even though I know perfectly well that none of it happened. That boy on the bicycle wasn’t my friend, I never went to that shopping mall and nobody’s mother ever called me in for dinner from that particular front door.

So artificial intelligence has been showing me memories I never actually had.
There is something wonderfully absurd about that. We have invented one of the most futuristic technologies imaginable and apparently one of the first things we’ve decided to do with it is make ourselves nostalgic for a time when artificial intelligence belonged somewhere between flying cars and robots doing the washing up.

I’m not even convinced I genuinely want the nineties back, because nostalgia is very good at editing. It remembers summer holidays but leaves out the days when you were bored out of your mind, and it remembers cycling to someone’s house without announcing yourself but conveniently forgets that sometimes they weren’t home and you’d cycled twenty minutes for absolutely nothing. It remembers spending an afternoon in town with your friends but not standing outside a shop forever because nobody could agree on what to do next.
A Tuesday afternoon in 1994 was still a Tuesday afternoon. I was probably not walking around thinking, God, what an extraordinarily authentic analogue childhood I’m having.

I was probably bored.

And there are plenty of things I have absolutely no desire to give back. I like Google Maps, Spotify, online banking and being able to order something at ten o’clock at night without having to locate a catalogue and fill in a form. I particularly appreciate being able to sit on my sofa, notice that one of my cats is doing something strange with her ear and immediately investigate seventeen possible explanations, twelve of which will briefly convince me she’s dying before I discover she’s probably just itchy.

Progress has its advantages.

So perhaps those videos aren’t really making me miss the nineties at all. Maybe what they bring back is the strange feeling of living in a world that was smaller but somehow seemed enormous. You knew fewer people, had access to less information and could disappear for an entire afternoon without anyone tracking your location, yet there always seemed to be somewhere you hadn’t been and something you hadn’t discovered.
Maybe it’s seeing parents at an age younger than you are now, before you ever thought of them as people who were getting older. Maybe it’s remembering people who were simply there then and aren’t anymore, or the version of yourself who had no idea what the next thirty years were going to contain. Even photographs belonged to that world. You took one, hoped for the best and sometimes discovered weeks later that someone’s eyes were closed and your arm looked enormous. There was no second attempt, so you kept the terrible photograph anyway and, thirty years later, somehow it’s one of your favourites.

I don’t entirely trust the idea that everything was better then, because I’m fairly sure people in the nineties were already talking about how much better things had been before. Every generation seems to believe it arrived just in time to witness the end of the good old days, which means that one day the girls from the coffee shop will probably be thirty nine and watching beautifully filtered videos of 2026, feeling nostalgic for iced matcha, AirPods and whatever ordinary Thursday afternoon they didn’t realise they would one day miss.
By then I’ll presumably still be telling people about the eclipse of 1999.

Maybe that’s what those strange little videos are really good at. They don’t make me want my old life back; they just remind me that there were once versions of my life I didn’t know I would miss while I was busy living them.

Or perhaps Instagram has simply discovered that a grainy VHS filter and the right synthesizer are devastatingly effective on people approaching forty.

Given what I know about algorithms, I wouldn’t rule that out.

-Sophie Quinn