We were never supposed to remember this much.

Every bad website, every filtered selfie, every half-finished playlist. All of it’s still out there, floating in some dusty corner of the internet. The Wayback Machine alone has archived nearly a trillion web pages. For those of us who grew up during the messy birth of the internet, it’s a bit like peering into a time capsule. For anyone younger, it’s probably closer to shock therapy.

Clicking through early versions of Google or Yahoo websites is a trip. The colours were loud. The layouts, clunky, oddly reminiscent of a physical newspaper. And yet, there’s something charming, even comforting about it all. No infinite scroll. Minimal advertisements. And no algorithm guiding you on what to click next. What you saw was what there was to see. Just raw, hand-coded ambition.

*Before the infinite scroll and algorithm there was Yahoo c.2001*

But the past isn’t only preserved on forgotten servers. It lives in our own pockets, closets, and junk drawers too. Burned CD playlists collecting dust in our parents’ basement. The ‘On This Day’ notifications reminding us of who, and where we were five, ten, fifteen years ago. Old devices that were once a hub for our busy, digital lives—frozen in time after they were replaced by something newer and brighter.

Each device, app, and archive quietly accumulating artifacts of a person we were and the one we’re still becoming.

It’s almost easy to think it was always like this.

The truth is, for our parents, grandparents, and generations beyond, reminders of the past were largely anchored in things you could hold in your hands: family heirlooms, a handful of photos, newspaper clippings announcing a birth, a wedding, or a death.

That’s not to say that the past didn’t exert a significant pull on people’s lives. But in some ways, it was more easily escapable than today. You could tuck it into boxes in a storage room and leave it there. Waiting for you to interact with it.

These days, the past rides around in our back pocket. My iPhone has some twenty thousand photos stretching back over a decade. Screenshots of random curiosities, a few sunsets that felt profound, candid photos of family and friends—and, inevitably, of myself. (Editor’s note: it’s mostly sunsets) If I printed all of them and stacked them, the pile would be taller than a two-story house. It’s even more damning when I consider every analogue photo of me—or that I took—fits inside a bankers box in my basement.

What am I doing with them? Who are they for? Future Stephen isn’t going to scroll through all of them. Past Stephen wasn’t thinking about what future Stephen might do with them. The truth is, I took them for present day Stephen—and then just never deleted them.

I pride myself on being pretty tech savvy but I’m going to stand on business here and tell you I’m not certain whether these photos are actually even stored on my phone or in the cloud. (Editor’s note: they are, in fact, on his phone.)

Software and technology have also made the act of carrying this digital baggage around even more frictionless as time passes.

The result is that—on occasion—I’ll open the Photos app and see myself back in 2015 and feel… conflicted.

That decade old version of myself: shirtless, tanned and grinning in a mid-run selfie. More muscular. Less tired-looking.

More happy?

It makes me wonder: when our past selves are so visible and accessible, are we more likely to see them as aspirational…or as shadows we can’t quite live up to?

I’m also cognisant that my experience is rooted in the fact I was already an adult when this digital revolution hit a running pace. There’s a significant portion of my life that only exists in the physical realm—photographs, old notebooks from school. It made me curious how someone who grew up fully immersed in this digital landscape might feel about it.

To explore this, I reached out to Sarah, a thoughtful twenty-something and talented professional photographer. Someone who was young enough to have spent their adolescence online yet old enough to remember the days when “everyone posted everything”. Over the years, she’s spent countless hours documenting moments—for her own life and for others—while also noticing what’s worth leaving undocumented.

For Sarah, the act of looking back doesn’t feel like a confrontation with someone she’s lost touch with, but a subtle way of measuring growth. She told me that revisiting old photos reminds her of where she once was in life and the chapters she’s since moved through. Sometimes it’s even “a reminder of old connections I’ve moved on from since those days.” It’s less about reliving a former self and more about noticing how her style, her relationships, and her sense of self have shifted over time.

I found that viewpoint deeply refreshing. Sarah, at 23, already has nearly a decade of her life online. An archive full of growth and change. For me, it’s been closer to 20 years. Maybe that difference in time and life stage shapes how each of us carries what’s accumulated.

When I revisit old photos, there’s a risk I get stuck comparing. Fooled into thinking younger-Stephen was happier and more audacious. Maybe he was. But I also remember how much space I gave to other people’s perception of me back then, and how often that came at the expense of my own happiness.

That pull to curate and perform isn’t new. But in the digital age, it’s amplified. People don’t just form impressions based on real-world encounters anymore. They’re consuming a version of us curated across dozens of platforms, photos, and posts. A composite of what we’ve chosen to share.

Maybe that tension is universal. As Sarah echoed, “I used to be so wrapped up in what people thought of me…how I came across to them.”

Over time, she’s started to let go of that fear, but there’s an irony in how our digital lives are structured. “Although the Internet remembers everything, people don’t,” she told me.

That thought lingered with me.

The digital record we’ve been capturing—this form of storytelling we’ve become so practiced at—is one-sided. It preserves what we documented in images and characters, but not necessarily the private inner monologue. It lacks the nuance and texture of being that person in that moment.

And yet, in a way, it can feel liberating. Most of what we’ve posted barely lingers in anyone else’s memory. And yet, the digital traces remain, preserved in archives and algorithms that surface them for us again and again. What people might naturally have forgotten; technology ensures we don’t.

For Sarah, part of navigating this tension has been to draw a line between her personal and professional presence online. Her private account feels like a digital diary, meant only for people she knows or once knew, while her public photography page serves a different purpose. She acknowledges the emotional weight these archives can carry. How they’re layered with both joy and sadness.

Still, she’s aware of the paradox: even when we tell ourselves we’re only posting for our own satisfaction, there’s always an audience. As she puts it, “It’s not realistic to say, ‘I’m doing it for myself.’ Because if that were the truth, it wouldn’t need to be published on social media for others to consume in some form.”

It reminded me of something I explored in The Ghosts in Our Followers List—how people are increasingly gravitating towards smaller, more curated circles for sharing their lives. Many have even created “finstas” or secondary accounts. Whether we refer to it as branding, or curation, it’s a skill we’ve all had to learn.

We’re only just beginning to understand what it means to carry our lives in pixels and binary code. My generation (Elder Millennials) already has over 15 years’ worth of social media posts, archived chats, and photos scattered across old laptops, smartphones, and cloud accounts.

Even Sarah, thoughtful and intentional about what she captures or shares publicly, admits she’s kept most of her archive. She describes herself as sentimental (something I can relate to) and says there’s “this odd fear I have that one day I might need the photos, or for some reason want to look back on them.” Like many of us, me included, she hasn’t quite figured out where it comes from but says it’s “made me keep everything.”

And so, the archive grows.

For most of human history, what we didn’t remember simply slipped away, unless it was written down or passed on. Those artifacts waited quietly, or at least gave us space. Space to step more fully into who we were becoming, or to move forward without a constant reminder of where we’d been.

That younger, seemingly lighter Stephen isn’t gone. He’s right there in my pocket. There are moments he stirs a kind of nostalgia, a reminder of a time when life seemed simpler. But if I’m not careful, he becomes a measuring stick I never asked for.

Still carrying your own archive? Send this along to a friend who might relate.

You can also find Sarah’s thoughtful work over on Instagram.

Digital Echoes

On Grief