A few nights ago I was sat scrolling through old TikToks. Trips we’d taken, days out, clips of my boy when he was small. Archie’s just coming to the end of his first year at the comp now, and there he was on my screen, years younger, on some beach or halfway up some hill, completely unaware of timetables and homework and all the bullshit that the comp brings. And I felt it. That warm, aching pull that people usually call nostalgia.
But here’s what caught me. I wasn’t just grieving my own younger self, freer than I am now, less burdened. I was grieving his. The small boy in those clips doesn’t exist any more. He’s been replaced, gradually and rightly, by someone taller and busier with more on his plate. Two losses in one thumb-swipe. And it struck me that this is just what living in time feels like when you actually pay attention to it. Every present moment is the quiet ending of the one before. We are, in some small way, constantly in a state of grief. That isn’t a malfunction. It’s a signal that something mattered.
I’ve written before about the phrase “the good old days” and why I don’t trust it. When people say things were better back then, I don’t think they’re really describing the era. I think they’re describing themselves in it. Young, unburdened, alive, with most of life still in front of them. The warmth is real. The attribution is false. They aren’t grieving a better time. They’re grieving their own aliveness, and they’ve pinned it onto a decade. They weren’t the good old days. They were just our days.
And it’s worth being honest about the era too, because the good old days were often quite hard. They were the outside toilet on a frozen morning and the bedroom you could see your breath in. They were the long journeys that stayed undreamt of because travel was slow and dear, the meal ruined by the smoke drifting over from the next table, the question you simply couldn’t answer because the knowledge sat in a library you’d never reach. Whatever those years were, they weren’t easy. So the warmth can’t be coming from the conditions, because the conditions were worse. Which leaves only one place for it to come from. Not the time. Us, in it.
And it’s worth being honest about the phone too, because the app wasn’t a neutral bystander in any of this. I didn’t climb into the loft and open a shoebox of photographs. I didn’t choose to remember. TikTok handed my past back to me, unprompted, stitched together, music underneath. There’s a real difference between a memory you visit and a memory that visits you. The shoebox is an act of remembering, and you’re in charge of it. The feed is something else. It has learned that my own aliveness, sold back to me on a loop, is one of the most effective things it can show me, because that feeling keeps me watching.
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
So is that a good thing or a bad thing? My honest answer is that it’s a mirror that can quietly become a cage. Good, in that it lets you feel the loss and name it for what it actually is. Bad, in that it’s built to keep you feeling it. The visiting turns into living-there. Grief that was meant to be a passage becomes a residence. The memory isn’t the problem. The loop is. Healthy grief moves through acknowledgment and acceptance and eventually adapts forward. Nostalgia gone wrong is that final step refused, reaching back for a safety that’s already gone. Except here, you didn’t refuse the step. An algorithm refused it for you, and called it a feature.
I think this matters beyond one dad on his sofa. A person who lives in the loop stops adapting, and I’d argue a culture does the same. When the future feels uncertain, the past becomes the one safe place, because it’s finished. You already survived it. And a culture that spends its time trying to retrieve what it remembers, rather than build what it hasn’t seen yet, will keep reaching for walls and bans and restorations instead of asking the harder question of what forward could look like. The pull backward and the urge to prohibit are cousins. Both are fear of the unknown wearing better clothes.
But the pull itself isn’t the enemy. What I’m slowly working out is that the memories are mine and I get to keep them. I just don’t have to live inside them, and I certainly don’t have to let an app decide when I feel them. Archie is moving forward whether I like it or not. That’s his job. Mine, I think, is to notice that today is quietly becoming the next chapter of those clips, the ones some future version of me will ache over. The best answer to a good memory has never been rewatching it. It’s making the next one. Which does make me wonder, when the past arrives uninvited on your screen and that ache rises, whose aliveness are you actually missing. And what would it take to go looking for it here, in the days you’re in now?
