Nostalgia
Growing up on the internet
Hi all,
Per the title, below you’ll find an essay about nostalgia and the internet. It’s pretty long and was going to be longer, but instead I decided to have a related/follow up essay on aging and beauty. I’d love to know your thoughts, and I appreciate you taking the time to read it.
Before we get into it, a few personal notes:
My husband is embarrassed about this but he submitted his personal story to his union’s newspaper and they published it this month. I know that I haven’t shared his name here before (he’s private and not online), but I am so proud of him and feel compelled to share this (with his permission of course). If you are not an IBEW member and don’t get the Electrical Worker, you’re missing out, but luckily it’s available online here. I credit both of our union jobs for our wonderful and secure life together and I believe everyone should have what we have.
My friend Nicole was a guest on Yowei Shaw’s podcast, Proxy, with someone who was very active with ACT UP in the 1980s. I was really moved by their conversation — not just as someone who knows and loves Nicole and who also relates to her constant anger — but as an organizer who wants to be in this for the long haul. I highly recommend listening.
The next newsletter will only be advice, please write in anonymously here.
A note on paying for my newsletter: I know there are a LOT of newsletters out there — I subscribe to hundreds and obviously can’t financially support them all. But if you have ever gotten good advice, read something interesting that you may not have otherwise found, or learned something from one of my essays — or if you’re one of the people who opens and reads every email — I would love it if you subscribed for the price of a cup of coffee. It’s maybe cringe to admit but I spend many hours thinking about, working on, and writing these — it is work, and it means a lot to me. If it means something to you, please support my work by subscribing.
All of my archives are paywalled three weeks after publishing, so becoming a paying subscriber gives you access to all of my previous newsletters. I am also toying with the idea of adding in more subscriber-only content — I will probably continue to paywall some advice questions. If you’re a paying subscriber and there’s something special/specific you want to see, let me know!
Love,
Your friend Mindy
I’ve been feeling really nostalgic lately. I can’t tell if it’s because we’re knee deep in the holiday season, or just because I’m getting older, or from some combination of the two. But for the first time ever, I feel old, or at least older; significantly different than how I remember feeling before; or at least it feels that everything is different now than it used to be. And it seems like everyone in my generation feels this same way; there has been a lot of millennial-specific content around lately, at least in my personal slice of the internet.
It’s not dramatic or extreme but sometimes I catch myself in the mirror and think, huh, that’s not really what I expected to see! It’s not a big deal and I just keep it moving (more on beauty in a follow up to this!), but I’ve been really noticing and feeling the passage of time in other ways too — like if I have more than 3 drinks I can’t function the next day; if I miss a scheduled workout I’m genuinely bummed out. But it’s not just me that’s changed, it’s the world around me: I won’t ever stop calling the train station at 10th and Market “Market East;” I still call Columbus Avenue “Delaware Avenue;” NRG station will forever be “Pattison.” I could go on and on and I probably will. I walk the same routes, on the same streets that I’ve walked for a decade, and every single business is different, every house has been replaced.
Outside of two years in Great Barrington, Massachusetts as a teenager, and another two year stint in Durham, North Carolina in my 20s, I have lived my entire life in the same 15 mile radius. I spent 16 uninterrupted years in my childhood home in Melrose Park, a first-ring suburb. After two years in Western Massachusetts, I lived in South Philly, then back home, then Port Richmond (way before it was cool, in a part of the neighborhood that still isn’t cool), then South Philly again, then North Carolina, then back to South Philly. But none of those places are the same as they were, everything is different. I know that’s the nature of cities (they change!) and time (it only moves forward!) but I have felt desperate to suspend reality and go backwards for just a few days. It’s not that I’m not content where I am or that I’m in a failure to launch situation — it’s just that all of the corny stuff is extremely true, and you really don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.
An non-exhaustive list of things I want: just one more weekend in high school, in Laura’s back room, drinking Carlo Rossi wine out of a mug and letting her pierce my ears. One more fall afternoon watching the skater boys at Broad and Cecil B Moore, before walking to class with Zoe. One more night at Medusa Lounge, dancing with my friends, and then going to Little Pete’s with Dana, drunkenly ordering plates of whipped cream (not an actual menu item). One more night at Adobe Cafe, doing karaoke with my sister, eating the best vegan wings. One more summer day at Cantina, drinking happy hour margaritas without a care in the world. But Laura obviously no longer lives in her childhood home; Medusa Lounge and Little Pete’s are permanently closed; Adobe moved and it was never the same after that; for obvious reasons it would be weird if I watched the 18 year old skaters on Temple’s campus; Cantina still exists but the vibes have shifted and/or I have.
I could name a million things — bars and restaurants and clubs and places and people — that are now gone. Things that felt like, to me, the fabric of the city. Things that changed the fabric of who I am as a person, then and now and forever! I read this cute little lifestyle piece in the Inquirer, How to have a Perfect Philly Day, according to ‘Predator: Badlands’ director Dan Trachtenberg, and started to spiral. No idea who this guy is (I don’t watch movies anymore, I’m sorry), but we seemed to have similar childhoods: I also spent a lot of time at the Willow Grove Mall (still there, but different), went to Temple (still there, but different), and spent many days during middle and high school on South Street, shopping at Retrospect (moved and now different), Tower Records (gone), and embarrassingly, Condom Kingdom (there but not relevant to me as I no longer find sex to be slapstick). Everything is different and also I am too.
Apparently Thomas Wolfe said, “you can’t go home again,” which I only know from another formative childhood memory, watching Now and Then. But I really want to. Not to my childhood home, which is gone now, anyway: sold in 2023 after my dad died, then flipped beyond recognition and sold again — but somewhere beyond the physical realm, back to a time when my primary obligations in life were to get through school and have fun. It’s true that at the time, the stakes of everything felt really high, and I would never want to relive most days of high school; I wanted to crawl out of my own skin. But there was a sweet spot in there, starting during my two years at Temple (my last two at college), and until I was 25 or so, where, looking back, my biggest priority was having fun. It’s easy to say that we’re wearing rose-colored glasses when we think about the past; I know that’s true to some degree. In many ways I was miserable for a lot of these years: my family felt constantly in crisis; I was sick and depressed and twisted up in an eating disorder that I felt like I was never going to kick; I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life; I was generally lost, which I think is a normal way to feel in your late teens and early 20s, but at the time felt so scary and so lonely.
But the thing is, even when times felt really tough, in retrospect it mostly never included any of the really bad stuff, or even the serious stuff: no one got sick or died; I never got accidentally pregnant or even thought about having kids. Even money troubles weren’t that scary: rent seemed to be permanently capped at $400, and I was either living off student loans or feeling rich making $13 an hour. I know that I was sad a lot for sometimes inexplicable reasons (the chemicals in my brain), but also I did not know that I was happy when I was happy. All of the boomers who told me to relax and enjoy my life were, infuriatingly, right. And if I could go back I would do everything so much better: all of the cool stuff, none of the cringe stuff — like I'd go to that party to see the guy I liked and I’d look hot but this time not throw up everywhere. I’d say yes to more stuff, like playing hooky to go to Beach Thursdays or sleeping at Georgia’s or occasionally doing drugs.
Throughout all these years, I was online. For better or for worse, I’ve always been online. As a kid, I spent hours in my family’s computer room on inappropriate AOL chat rooms, fascinated by the worlds that became open to me. Then I was on AIM, perfecting my emo away messages, and then on MySpace, but it never really did it for me — not like LiveJournal. I begged my camp counselors to let me sign into their Facebook accounts before I could finally get my own — and when I did, I spent hours on it, obsessed with figuring out who knew each other and how, and trawling through events to see who RSVP’d to what. The internet was not the cure for my incessant nosiness, but the opposite, a constant taste of more more more. This person led to that person and then that person and then that person — people I had no reason to care about, and yet, there I was, happily click click clicking.
But the internet wasn’t all bad. Facebook is how Georgia and I became friends. I kept seeing her (on Facebook and in real life), and I knew I wanted to be her friend (in real life). I sought her out at a party that I knew she’d be at (probably from Facebook), and made sure to meet her very casually and “randomly,” then I friended her (on Facebook). I asked her (wrote on her wall) if she’d cut my hair short (she said yes). She asked if I had a washer and dryer she could use (I did) and the rest was history.
Long before I turned 30 I deleted all of my photo albums on Facebook. Remember those? They had meticulously tracked my adolescence, mostly via digital camera: entire photo albums dedicated to times I got high as shit in high school (lol); times I went to stupid and sexist parties (tennis hoes and golf pros), partly wanting to fit in, partly wanting to be a thorn in everyone’s side because I knew I never would; PhotoBooth pictures taken on my MacBook with Zoe, wearing American Apparel bodysuits; all my pictures from my two years at Simon’s Rock: charting all the time I spent with Allegra and then Lea and Julia, falling in love (twice!), doing a near equal amount of studying and partying; dressing up to take the subway and the el to the Ox, so nervous to see all the people I had previously seen on Facebook. Seemingly every moment of my life documented and saved and labeled, album titles created with hipster song lyrics or inside jokes. (Crucially, American Apparel, Simon’s Rock, and the Ox no longer exist. And the subway and el aren’t even called the subway and el anymore!)
I remember looking at these relics of time, a decade of my life chronicled by my digital camera, and feeling so embarrassed: I had been so young, so immature, so stupid! So I deleted them, hoping I could start fresh as a new adult, maybe add a little mystery to my life — no more documenting everything for the internet. But the digital camera and Facebook just transitioned to the iPhone and Instagram, an internet glow-up. And before stories there were multiple grid posts a day, like our on-trend outfits and the most boring photo of a sandwich with the grainiest filter thrown on top, with 10 hashtags in the caption. But then when that became extremely uncool, I just deleted those too. I can’t help but blush when I think back on this time, all of these times. I may have been stupid and immature, but I was so sincere. I so badly wanted to have fun and something more, too: connection. The internet to me was a place where you could put out your hand and have someone grab it, with a friend request or a like or a comment.
My algorithm knows all of this, and keeps feeding me millennial-specific slop. At night I eat a gummy and am a pig at the trough for it: scrolling in bed, laughing manically at reels about what it was like to be a teen and young adult in the aughts: before AI there was SmarterChild; millennials when *this song* comes on and it’s Mr. Brightside; 15 year old me in the back of a 20 year old’s car going 90 mph while my mom thought I was at a sleepover; millennial optimism & the 2010s hipster optimism. I know it’s not funny nor clever but I’m still desperate for it, I want more more more.
I’ve been genuinely laughing at all of the memes I see on Instagram, about how we got dressed and went out just to take pictures and then upload them on Facebook — just to document ourselves and our lives. How self-important; how sweet and earnest. I’m now a little sad that those photos are gone, even though I know I’d still cringe to see them. The internet wasn’t just a place to reflect our lives, it was a place to live it too, and I miss it. Obviously the internet still exists (hello!) but it’s different now and so are we. But sometimes I really wish we could go back.
Reading
My Mother’s Memory Loss, and Mine
Jeffrey Epstein, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the Future of American Politics
The Rise and Fall of Barboncino Workers United
The Internet Is Destroying Our Memory and History
Bari Weiss’s Big Secret Is That She’s Boring
From SaaS to RaaS: Agentic Software and Humanoid Robots to Replace Workers
The Construction Industry’s Invisible Villains
Why Do People Feel Like They Are Falling Behind?
Watched, Tracked, and Targeted
My year of divesting from beauty culture
miss that port richmond spot so bad; miss cramming a 30 rack of pbr in my reload bag and almost falling off my bike a million times on the way to all the house shows… I love nostalgia tripping! The glasses, they are rose colored!!!
this was just really really nice to read, brought me back to a different time ☁️
also I was just talking with a friend about how millenials deleted our fb party pics to look hireable for a “real job” that never came, and now we’re in our mid-30s and we’d give anythinggg to have those stupid pics back. it’s kinda fitting that they’re gone though, I like that we can reminisce about that era with rose colored glasses like how old people are supposed to do lol!