Core Memory Unlocked
Preemptive nostalgia and the ‘cinematograph-fication’ of our day to day lives.
We are a generation obsessed with preemptive nostalgia.
Since we have all become the directors of our own social media biopics, the way we narrativise our own lives and reminisce over our experiences while they are happening has become a caricature of sentimentality. The idea of capturing the little moments to look back on wistfully has morphed into the urge to live life as we want it to be remembered. We see this most blatantly in the Instagram content of parents with their children, filming highly choreographed picnics in the sun and tagging them ‘core memory unlocked’, overlaid with dreamy filters and soft piano music — the ‘cinematograph-fication’ of the day to day.
I’m an incredibly nostalgic person. I’ve often thought that everyone has an age that they get stuck on. Not in terms of maturity, but as if that period of time remains the most raw, the most foundational to the creation of who you went on to become. Perhaps that age hasn’t happened for you yet, or perhaps it can be updated as you grow older and evolve in different ways. Perhaps when I’m 60 I’ll look back on this era, half a lifetime ago, and think how this is the age I keep dwelling on. But for now, and for my whole adult life thus far, the age I just can’t shake is 15.
At 15 there was so much that felt important. It was a period of obsession.
Crushes, friends, music, drinking, gagging for as many new experiences as possible. When reminiscing about this chapter of my life I think back on the people, the places, the first. These memories never really stopped playing on the TV screen in my mind, they felt like the kind of thing one remembers, and so they have been ever-present, growing with me. Over time they have been filtered through the eyes of an adult woman. I thought that by returning to these memories I was dipping my toe back into what it was to be a teenager, but now I know that’s not the case. I’m sure of that because recently I unlocked an actual core memory. I accidentally summoned the literal emotion of my 15 year old self, and it was gut wrenching.
It came out of nowhere. There I was, checking the group WhatsApp, someone had posted the Glastonbury line up. One name jumped out at me. I’m not going to say who because that doesn’t matter, what matters is that in their hay day I didn’t really care for this band. I have never knowingly chosen to listen to them. But as I sat drinking my morning coffee my brain dredged up a couple of lyrics, some vague synthy rhythms. ‘Hey Google, Play [insert early 00s band of your choice here]’.
The opening bars ignited neural pathways that had laid dormant for nearly 15 years. I felt sick. The obsession and the thrills and the firsts were regurgitated up from the pit of my stomach. Palpable, visceral, acrid. There was no grainy footage. No indy-film montage. Just pure, unadulterated teenage angst.
The moments from my past that have become my heavy rotation memories have had the emotions scrubbed clean, leaving them rose tinted, or at least concluded and neatly narrativised. They have lost their bite.
But this song… it was the background music in the primordial soup that I evolved from. It was in the amniotic fluid that surrounded my slowly maturing mind…I paid little attention to it at the time but it was everywhere, all around me, woven into every experience. The feelings from that era had been neatly preserved in its chords, and I stumbled across this tomb on a Tuesday morning just as I was about to join a Zoom call with my manager. The feeling of being 15 years old mainlined into my 30 year old veins as I sat in my velvet armchair with my dog, in my house that I share with my long-term partner; a collision of worlds so opposing it gave me whiplash.
Our obsession with preemptive nostalgia and the desire to memorialise in the moment is futile. We don’t get to choose what preserves the different iterations of our life. You cannot decide what will connect you to your previous self, you won’t truly know until many years from now when you accidentally stumble onto a perfectly preserved fossil, as yet untainted by the brains desires to narrativise. Your spade will hit gold and release a feeling so familiar and yet so distinct from the sort you have grown accustom to, almost extra-terrestrial. And then it will pass, and you’ll finish your coffee and go on with your day.