#nostalgia

About a month ago, I started listening to The Joe Rogan Experience.

I had somehow gone its entire existence without really listening to it. I started with a few recent episodes, liked them well enough, and then decided to do something slightly unreasonable: go back to the beginning.

So lately I have been listening to episodes recorded around late 2009 and early 2010.

I was a freshman in high school then.

The strange thing is how little distance I sometimes feel between that world and this one.

Someone will mention a movie, a musician, a television show, a celebrity, some weird thing that happened in the news, and immediately I remember it. Not merely the thing itself, either. I remember talking about it.

I remember conversations in hallways, at lunch, after school, online. I remember what my friends thought. I remember jokes that came from things everyone had seen. I remember arguments over music, movies and whatever happened to be going on that week.

I hadn’t realized how much of my memory of that period was made of conversations about things.

And listening to those old episodes has made me realize something else:

I hardly have those conversations anymore.

That is not because pop culture disappeared.

There may be more culture available now than at any other point in human history. There are more movies, more television shows, more musicians, more podcasts, more writers, more videos and more things to pay attention to than anyone could consume in a lifetime.

today, i replaced the hard drive of one of my computers with a solid-state drive, which made it go as fast as it has ever run before, and perhaps even faster. to help with the task, one of my co-workers lent me an SATA-to-USB cable, which was the first one I had ever seen or used. for the first time since my long-used laptop died two years ago, I was able to go inside the old hard drive, which contained not only photos and videos from the past ten years or so, but also files going as far back as the first personal computer I ever owned in my life. this nostalgic experience got me thinking about the role of the cloud in one's digital existence.

no longer is a file, a memory, a creation, linked to any one physical location, as previously when even digital media had to reside SOMEWHERE, such as a small shell of cold metal that fits in your pocket. when we depend on the cloud instead, does it change the way we create and store our memories? personally, my experience has been to err toward conservative storage when using the cloud because of how they charge using subscription models and using tiered pricing based on the size of the files. when the storage medium is my own, these worries don't appear on the horizon, because I already own the drive. the shift in paradigm reminds me of renting versus buying: each hard drive you might buy is like a little house, which you furnish as your own. using the cloud is like renting: if you forget to pay, or cannot do so any more, you'll get an eviction notice and all your memories will be wiped with the cold-heartedness and immediacy of a cron job (or a wrecking ball, to use an analogy from the physical world).