What people often call nostalgia is too small a word for what many of us feel when we look back at life before the internet. This is not a sentimental longing for youth, nor a refusal to accept the present. It is something more structural: a recognition that whole stretches of lived experience now sit outside the modern systems of memory.
Large parts of everyday life before the internet were never meant to be archived. They existed as lived experience rather than data. Conversations were not logged, rooms were not photographed, ordinary streets on ordinary days were not documented. What remains today is not hidden behind a paywall or lost to poor search results — it simply does not exist. The absence is not a personal failure to find it. The record genuinely stops.
The internet age inverted this relationship with memory. Almost everything now leaves residue: photographs, timestamps, metadata, surveillance, backups. The present is endlessly replayable. Yet this abundance comes at a cost. Experience has become thinner, more mediated, more performative. What existed before was dense precisely because it was not designed to be recalled, shared, or optimised. It existed fully in the moment, and then it was gone.
This creates a quiet but persistent asymmetry. The years that mattered most are the least recoverable. The present, by contrast, is exhaustively documented but often less meaningful. No future technology, no amount of money, and no hypothetical AI will reconstruct what was never stored. At best, fragments can be triangulated: a photograph here, a programme listing there, an address, a date, a weather report. But continuity — the sense of being there again — is irretrievably broken.
This is the uncomfortable truth: much of what mattered most survives only inside the people who lived it. And as time passes, even that archive degrades. Memories blur, witnesses disappear, and the final copies fade. That does not make those years less real. It makes them more so. They were not designed to be revisited. They were designed to be lived once.
If there is any consolation, it is a sober one. To have lived fully in a time that left so little behind is to have experienced something that cannot be replicated, simulated, or accessed later by anyone else. That loss is real. But so was the life that produced it.
