The Good Ol' Days

I’ve been having a lot of conversations recently about nostalgia. A lot of that nostalgia comes from missing the time before the internet and social media completely dominated our lives. I feel fortunate to have been alive before it took over. In those years, it really was a peak time to be alive. Illegal raves, concerts, and parties — before anyone had a video option on their phone. Fuck, I remember when I didn’t even have a cell phone.

I feel like those were the last years when people had to organically develop their personalities. We were wild, raw, and unfiltered. We learned what music we liked by going out and letting it pump through our blood, not from an Instagram post. We learned how to dress ourselves through real fashion influences, not some girl on the internet. We were savage and unhinged before they became empty trend words for someone who puts pumpkin spice syrup in her coffee instead of vanilla.

For me — and many others my age — those were the last times the world felt truly real. Back then, none of my friends looked like me. We were different ages, different styles, different tastes. We gathered together and had so much fun, and there’s no evidence of it. We didn’t go out to make content — we just lived. Our sense of self was built from experience and the things we genuinely got off on.

Now I see the younger generation harvesting their personalities from social media — imitating and borrowing whatever is currently trending and accepting it as part of who they are. Curating their lives for the algorithm and developing personas that would crumble without their Instagram Explore page.

We’re being crippled by the constant overwhelm of news, politics, and unfiltered negativity. But we’re also drowning in inauthenticity, and somehow finding ourselves in a competition we never even entered. Spirituality used to be something we turned to when we wanted to evolve or retrain our belief systems. Now it’s a social media trend, with the younger generation replacing one set of patriarchal beliefs with another set of cult-like ones.

More recently, even authenticity has become a trend word — and even that doesn’t feel authentic. It feels like another bundle of buzzwords passed around to suit the algorithm. Nothing feels genuine the way it did before social media — not even authenticity, which is now sold in a fucking Instagram-friendly package with angel-number pricing.

This is one of the reasons I stepped away from my business. I don’t want to be associated with the game. I will never curate my personality to be cool, sellable, or palatable. I accept all the layers of myself — the light, the darkness, and the freakiness — as one package, shaped over 41 years of self-acceptance, deep internal work, and following whatever made my heart beat faster or made my pussy wet when I thought about doing it.

As a tool, social media can be great. But it ain’t a fucking lifestyle.