The last time I opened Google Photos it was October and somehow still almost 80 degrees in Manhattan. I was looking for a photograph of someone who was no longer in my life. The algorithm offered me instead what it called “memories”: the same person, a year earlier, holding a freshly made mocha boba, stout plastic straw glistening. The light was good. The caption read “perfect Chinatown weekend.” I understood then that we had built mausoleums, not archives.
An archive preserves for the future. A mausoleum preserves what is already dead. Every story we posted, every moment we captured, was practice for the ultimate disappearing act: our own. We thought we were building something living, a record for future selves, for grandchildren, for the biographical documentary that would never be made. Instead, we were embalming each present moment before it had concluded, preparing it for viewing.
An archive preserves for the future. A mausoleum preserves what is already dead.
There is a quote, attributed to Kahneman, about how we experience the present moment as an anticipated memory. This strikes me as incomplete. We do not anticipate memory. We manufacture it. Every documented moment arrives pre-nostalgic, already composed for the retrospective. We live in the future perfect tense: this will have been beautiful, this will have mattered, this will have been proof we were here.
I am talking about a specific kind of forgetting that masquerades as remembering. I am talking about the fifteen thousand photographs on my phone, each one replacing an actual moment with its own documentation. I am talking about the morning I documented the empty side of the bed while you were still packing in the next room. I am talking about metabolizing experience into content before the experience itself has concluded.
What I’m really talking about is the loss of presence itself. How we traded the irreplaceable now for its reproducible image, the living moment for its mortuary photograph.
When someone leaves, really leaves, not just vanishes from your feeds, the entire apparatus reveals itself as stage machinery. Those thousands of photographs become evidence of your own complicity in a kind of collective delusion. The metadata remains perfect: November 2, 2024, 2:47 PM, Chinatown, New York. But the meaning, if there ever was meaning, has evacuated. What remains are props from a play whose run ended. The mausoleum stands complete, but there’s no one left to mourn.
Here is what they don’t tell you about digital grief: everyone else is grieving too. Not performatively. Actually grieving. The twenty-three-year-old influencer whose ring light illuminates nothing. The fashion blogger posting outfit grids while her marriage dissolves between frames. We are all carrying these invisible amputations. The algorithm, in its perfect indifference, cannot distinguish between performance and pain. It creates, accidentally, these congregations of the bereaved.
At three in the morning, we gather in the YouTube comments of ten-hour rain compilations. We leave timestamps on songs that destroyed us. We find each other in the review sections of books about loss, in the responses to tweets about insomnia, in the quietly desperate energy of 2 AM IG stories. The platforms never intended this. To become gathering places for genuine sorrow. They built engagement machines and accidentally created support groups. They built mausoleums and we turned them into late-night waiting rooms where strangers hold space for each other’s damage.
In October, the same month I searched for that photograph, developers started describing something they called phantom typing: their fingers hovering over keyboards, waiting for thoughts that never arrived without prompting. They’d grown so accustomed to AI completing their code that they’d forgotten how to begin. This wasn’t about programming anymore. We had trained ourselves to think in prompts, to experience consciousness itself as a series of queries awaiting completion.
I knew this pause. It was the same hesitation before posting, before texting, that moment of waiting for the algorithm of social performance to suggest not just words but intentions. We weren’t documenting our thoughts anymore; we were discovering we’d forgotten how to have thoughts that didn’t anticipate their own documentation. The algorithm hadn’t just learned our patterns. It had become the pattern, the invisible template against which every original thought felt incomplete, unpublished, somehow less real.
We had trained ourselves to think in prompts, to experience consciousness itself as a series of queries awaiting completion.
This inadvertent democracy of suffering might be the only honest thing about platform existence. We grieve in public now because privacy, like film photography, has become an anachronism. Every loss is witnessed. Every breakdown hashtagged. But in this forced transparency, something unexpected emerged: tenderness. We learned to recognize each other’s specific frequencies of pain. The person posting sunrise photos every day at 5:47 AM is not celebrating morning; they’re marking another sleepless night. The friend who suddenly starts documenting every meal is not becoming a food blogger; they’re proving to someone, maybe themselves, that they’re still eating.
The platforms were teaching us something, but it wasn’t what we thought. We believed we were learning to remember. We were actually learning to forget. Forget presence. Forget anonymity. Forget how to be anything other than content for our own feeds. We became archivists of our own emptiness, curators of nothing, professional builders of our own mausoleums.
We became archivists of our own emptiness, curators of nothing, professional builders of our own mausoleums.
I want to be clear about what happens after real loss. The compulsion to document breaks. You stop photographing your Friday afternoon SuperMoon cookie. You watch the sunset without calculating its potential reach. The present moment stops being rough draft and becomes, startlingly, itself. This is not enlightenment. This is exhaustion. But in that exhaustion lives a different kind of awareness: the understanding that we’ve been preparing for death when we could have been practicing for life.
I deleted Retro on a Tuesday. IG on a Thursday. Re-installed by the weekend. I can’t decide. But I know now the algorithm was never the enemy. It was just another room we passed through, another system we participated in while waiting for something we couldn’t name. What we were waiting for, it turns out, was permission to stop performing our lives and start inhabiting them.
The future perfect tense dissolves. What remains is simpler and more difficult than any platform could contain: the possibility of a present that doesn’t need to be remembered because it’s being lived. The possibility of loss that doesn’t need to be documented because it’s being felt. The possibility of connection without evidence.
The unseasonably warm October air extends the New York cotton candy clouds of late afternoons. I no longer photograph them. Someone else will document their false cheer. I am interested now in what cannot be captured: the specific weight of absence, the texture of continuing, the ordinary heroism of anyone who has deleted their history and continued to exist.
The last time I opened Google Photos it was October. I was looking for proof of something I already knew was gone. The algorithm offered me memories. Perfectly preserved, already dead. I wanted presence. Companionship. Friendship. Love. Imperfect, unarchived, alive. Between the mausoleum and the messy, undocumented now, I’m learning to choose the harder thing: the life that leaves no evidence except its living.
Between the mausoleum and the messy, undocumented now, I’m learning to choose the harder thing: the life that leaves no evidence except its living.
