To celebrate our ten year anniversary, we are inviting back former writers back to tpc in order to hear what they’ve been thinking about since leaving the post calvin. Today, please welcome back Katie Van Zanen. Katie (‘14) is gearing up to defend her dissertation in the 2023-2024 academic year and working to imagine a future beyond the university. She runs, reads, walks, cooks, consults, and gardens (sort of) around Ann Arbor, Michigan. She also writes future-making, a substack about navigating our changing climate and religious landscape in America.
Somewhere in the wilds of the internet is an essay that I once read and cannot find but think about all the time; it argues that the past is more accessible to us than it has ever been. I think about this lost essay every time I log onto Facebook, where I have spent the past five years checking the memories feature for the express purpose of locating and deleting statuses I made on this day in 2007. I think about it every time I get fed yet another instagram video about “girls getting ready to go to the club in 2011” or “the music from my tenth grade dance is playing in the grocery store” or just footage of someone flipping through the 1990 JCPenney Spring/Summer catalog. Wherever I go on the internet, the algorithm serves me millennial nostalgia content: remember those “dirt cups” with gummy worms in them? Remember tuscan kitchens?
I will be honest: I love this stuff. I send my high school bff every video in which her exact owl necklace from 2013 makes an appearance; I laughed at every version of the joke that “this can’t be the same brain I used to memorize nicki minaj super bass.” But you know me—I can’t stop my brain from also doing anthropology! And it is a gigantic historical anomaly that we have this level of access to and engagement with ephemera from our own childhoods. It is changing our relationship to time, and to the past, and to our pasts, and to ourselves. My grandma was born in 1936 on a farm near McBain; there are approximately three extant photos of her elementary school years. My parents had TV growing up, sure, but my dad had already graduated college when the first camcorder was released for professional use. I have an iPhone in my pocket right now with immediate access to every photo I’ve taken or saved since 2014.
It is, I suppose, less a fundamental change than an intensification of our ability to collect and catalog the past. Literacy researchers talk about writing itself as a technology—it is a way to extend our brain’s capacity through offsite storage. The earliest use cases were primarily in trade: recording inventories or the terms of a deal that could be referenced and verified, externalizing information that once lived only in the human brain. It took a while to popularize this capacity—seminarians in twelfth-century Paris had to straight up memorize everything Peter Lombard told them about the nature of the Trinity, because paper (or vellum, more likely) was too precious for note-taking. But we also eventually developed indexes and archives and the Dewey decimal system and now we have topic-searchable iPhone camera rolls and enormous databases and artificial intelligence that augment our fickle human brains with storage and processing power; they work like memory to call up relevant information or ideas for our engagement. They record some approximation of what we have said and bought and where we have been and with whom, so unnervingly vast a collection of details that we can be forgiven, perhaps, for imagining the past as it is recorded to be both graspable and comprehensive.
This website’s archives are such a technology, preserving for posterity a post I wrote nearly ten years ago about dancing at friends’ weddings, my clumsy, earnest thinking about being a foreigner in Egypt, reflections on the first days of my marriage and the sale of my childhood home. I go back and read through my own stuff more often than I want to admit. I try to place myself back in that moment, to remember what it was like. But I suspect that my algorithm full of nostalgia content and my habit of sharing funny callbacks with friends and my return, again and again, to things I wrote years ago, is an attempt to answer much bigger questions: was it really simpler and easier back then? Was the world a kinder place, or was I just more ignorant of its evils? Can I trust my memory? My judgment? My sense of what is true and good?
I know, from my too-many years of graduate school, that the past as it is served up to me by millennial nostalgia influencers is a product of economic forces and political ones; there is probably a whole dissertation already written on bump-its and the history of big hair and the ideas about gender represented by that artifact of our material culture. I know that my relationship to the artifacts of my own life—to the photos and journals and videos and web pages that record my presence on the earth—is shaped also by the evidentiary standards in English common law (pics or it didn’t happen). I know that the stories we tell about the past are really about the demands of the present. I know that memory is fickle. I know that the only constant is change.
The nostalgia content reveals to us that we were, in those idealized 1990s and 2000s and 2010s, subject to trends we did not recognize as such. The joke is that we were ridiculous then, with our too-deep side parts and song-lyrics-as-Facebook-album-titles, that we didn’t realize how that cerulean sweater came to be in our closet in the first place. The story it tells us is that we are all so much savvier now. But it also plays on our longing for a time in which we believed our stories to be entirely our own, and it works on me because I want so badly what that nostalgia tells me I once had: an unself-conscious location in the present, and the confident expectation that the future will be better and more beautiful than anything that came before.
If you are a former writer and interested in contributing this year, email info@thepostcalvin.com
Katie is a doctoral student in English and education at the University of Michigan. She loves the New York Times crossword puzzle, advice columns, oceans, and dogs of all kinds.
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Bangarang! Hook nostalgia. Loved reading this—the writing as a tool but especially and the way you wrapped it up. It’s so odd that takes almost no time at all for me to look back and be like, “I was an idiot back then!”