Uncharted Thoughts.

“We really did have everything, didn’t we”

AI FREE ZONE

The smell of rain, bright candy and grainy TV shows. Skipping school, wearing baggy clothes and smoking rollies behind the bike shed. All nighters, cheap ciders and laughing without the weight of a phone in our pocket. Nostalgia really is an acid trip, one I wish I could buy from a dealer, so I can escape this hell-hole we now live in.

I never took any photos from back then, I guess that was part of the beauty of it. We didn’t have the weight of a Iphone in our pocket, we lived for the moment more. We were present, we didn’t think about the future, or much about the past.

If there was a drug, that could make me feel how the late 90s and early 2000s felt. I’d be a searching through trash for my next meal so long as I could have another hit.

Looking back, everything looked so chaotic and plastic, a ugly world of tackiness, but it was so full of life and culture. These days, everything is so refined, so regimented and dead. Even toothpaste had wakey designs back then, now its blue, white and stripped like a business suit.

Everyone was poor, but, not poor in potential, not poor in friendships or family get togethers. Weddings were in the hometown, with friends and family, the boozer was filled with the town and we weren’t dreaming of some far off wonderland.

Maybe I’m looking through rose tinted glasses, and things weren’t as great as they seemed. Maybe the world is so bad now that even the days of 9/11, Iraq, and Afghanistan look nostalgic. Maybe, in 10-20-30 years I’ll look back on today as a time of limited technology and moments truly lived in, but I doubt it.

There is something really special about the late 90s and 00s. A time of technological advancements, yet the old world was still thriving and alive. While me and my mates might gather around a computer to play the latest game, we also spent most our day out and about. Getting up to no good.

Nostalgia is also built of the relationships, feeling and the sense of having lost something important. In these prime years of discovering life we felt the world with innocence. We loved strongly, because we had not loved before. We laugh loudly, because we had not laughed before. We moved with pride and curiosity because the world was still new. That’s why we often feel so strongly for our first love, we had yet to be broken hearted, to be betrayed or to feel rejected.

We are missing a place that no longer exists, and probably never really did, only in our mind.