Are you exceptionally exhausted with existence? Martha Plimpton said on Threads that there wasn’t the overwhelming feeling of dread in the 1990s that we feel today. Reflecting as someone who also remembers the 1990s, were we less miserably despondent then?
The impetus to see the past through rose-colored glasses is terribly human. Collective memory is prone to distillation and distortion. We’re apt to remember the best of times and the worst, but the quotidian disappears into the forgotten. Look back on your own life. Which parts of your life have become memories? How many routine aspects of your past have been written to the hard disk of your mind as a generalized idea? We’re apt to flatten our normals into a single non-notable idea. In comparison, the highs and lows pop out as notable. The moment, and the feelings of that actual moment, crystallize in our minds into a rendering. Sometimes that mental rendering is tinted, like a sepia photograph, with bittersweet vibes. Your feeling of joy is intertwined with the essence of loss and vague feelings of missing. Your sadness becomes both easier to remember and harder to understand.
Historically, collective memory must have felt different before the advent of photography. For most people, for most of history, visuals largely didn’t reinforce memory. Religious spaces told the stories of faith, often depicted in ways that showed the people in faraway times. Your own recent experiences were not reinforced visually. Your own life was lived and then written into memory. Oral tales traveled down family lines or through communities. Words warped the times, like a stretched-out shirt, still a garment but completely changed.
With the first photographic images, how did our cultural memories transform? In the earliest phases of photography, the cost and effort of the technology meant we only kept the best and worst of us — the dead babies and the wedding days. Where a wedding might have been remembered as smells and sounds, after photography, the actual event lived on the silvery surface of the photograph, maybe the only photograph you owned. Lived experience was scaffolded or even supplanted by a visual simulation.
Try to put yourself in the position of that first generation of people who could keep their memories as an image on their wall. What would that do to how you thought of your past? Would you be sad for the moments you’d not captured? Or would you be happy to have that one moment remembered visually? Or did you not even think about it? I’d guess you’d just accept the change without reflection.
After all, how many of us didn’t even think twice about how our minds were changed by smartphones? I only thought about the smartphone as a transformation of memory in retrospect. I signed up so quickly, thrilled to be able to capture meals, flower arrangements, and every other appealing thing I saw. Like a wildflower picked from life, those pictures felt less interesting after being captured. But I didn’t notice that loss of value for years. I just kept pulling out my phone. I kept pulling out from living moments to keep that memory. I was offboarding ideas from my mind and holding them safe on my drive. So safe as to be forgotten. Even worse, the actual memory didn’t stay in my mind. Now, when I go back to those pictures, I have no memory of why that moment was worth capturing.
What does this have to do with Martha Plimpton’s reflection? First, the 1990s were a time when photography was affordable. Disposable cameras were affordable. But these moments weren’t immediately rendered physical. Film had to be exposed and printed. They would appear in the mail in an envelope or be picked up at the store. Your mind could build a truth, which did then get changed by those photographs. Unlike our 19th-century predecessors, these were not just the best and worst of human existence. Instead, you had pictures of being a fool with your friends or your dog sneaking pizza. More of our memories, those funny, less notable moments, could be kept in your drawers. At the same time, cable allowed the world to see the worst of us in moving images. We watched the troops march into Kuwait. We saw the children of Rwanda starve. We saw the Challenger explode. (I could have added the pictures, but those of us who lived it have those moments in our minds. All of us can picture that cloud of smoke with the Challenger, or that starving child who was featured on fundraising commercials.)
But we could also turn off our televisions. The world was there in boxes in our living rooms, but not in our pockets. Our feelings about these terrible moments were interior or local. If we shared our feelings about the world, these ideas largely stayed local. The commentary about the world was left for professionals like journalists and professors.
Today, everyone can share their ideas about the moments we’re seeing, no matter where we live. In the vastness of the internet, confirmation bias rules supreme. We can find ideas that validate what we already believe. The ubiquity of critique means validity in general is not easy to assess. A good idea could live in online obscurity for the way it’s spoken or the way the speaker looks. A bad idea could rule the algorithms for the way the speaker looks or talks. Form supersedes function.
Algorithms push us to the same types of polarizing feelings as our own memories, to the most awful or the very best. After all, those algorithms have been calibrated to exacerbate that which makes us human. They ramp up our natural behaviors for their profit.
Which takes me back to the comments from Martha Plimpton. At the end of the last millennium, when she was dazzling on film, environmental issues, war in the Middle East, and the apathy of the youngest generation were constantly in the news. As a student, I remember feeling pessimism for the future. We felt dread.
The largest difference in terms of hope, for me, came from real life, from my friends and our forgotten moments. The worst and the best still live in my mind, but I know the best of my youth has long ago disappeared from my memory. But the feeling remains in my soul. The happiness of friends, the satisfaction of laughing until my ribs ached, the joy of belonging, all of those things came from real life.
I ache for the ways our phones have stolen authenticity from us. I cushion this point in the truth that smartphones and the internet have given the world boons. How many people have been able to access their bank accounts and job interviews by phone? How many people have found true friends online? But these phones have also transformed how we interact in real life. We’ve both lost chances to make real memories in our lived worlds because we’ll just take a picture. We’ve disconnected in real life at dinner or with friends to check something online. We’ve also ramped up the worst impetus of the 20th century, to see the ills of the world in real time. But unlike the 1990s when we could turn off the televisions, we keep mainlining the horror of our world.
Given the authoritarian regime, I am not advocating we stop listening. Instead, like how on planes they suggest you put on your mask before helping others, I invite you to remember your peace is what helps you find strength. Your memories are impacted by how you engage in technology.
Take another lesson from many of the earliest photographers. Artists like Anna Atkins took those tools to explore their intellectual side. She produced scores of cyanotypes of the natural world. She used the technology as a tool in her own practice instead of being ruled by it. Also, her own time was full of terrible times, like wars and high infant mortality.
Dread will always be there. It has actually always been there. The difference in our age is the addictive tools we hold every day. These phones, though, do not have to rule our minds. We can take back our memories. We can take back our lives. We can also adjust our connection to the news, decreasing the overwhelming feeling of dread each day. Even in reading this, if you made it to this moment, you just made it a few minutes without overwhelming doom and gloom. You sat with the past in ways that didn’t feel overwhelming (hopefully). Reading essays like this is one simple way to find balance in technology. Spending time looking at photographs, like those in this essay, is another. In both, you will also find a way to reframe your idea that this is the first time the world feels like it’s falling apart. Every generation has its trials. Every epoch has its defining moments. And every person who has ever lived has had some joys. It’s incumbent on you to hold to those joys and foster that sense of balance, if nothing else, because it’s what connects you to the humans who came before.
