The Algorithm is serving me ‘90s content, and I'm not mad about it

The Algorithm is serving me 90s content.

Warning. I'll now be showing my age. Maybe some Gen X'ers ("Hi! Remember us?" 👋🏼) and older Millennials can relate.

The content I'm being served includes videos of Blockbuster, photos of old phones, memes about "remember when email used to be fun?".

Ahhhh nostalgia.

** Side note… Insert reminder to be present. All these memories are in the past and while they are interesting, it's important to try and operate your life from your present day reality and not live your life dragging the past, whether positive or negative, with you. **

With that little side note out of the way. I did want to reflect on how the much more tangible and analogue the world was in the not too distant past. The rapid encroachment of technological advances in our lives has brought much convenience and positives into how we live. I definitely appreciate being able to Google facts on the spot, rather than wondering forever. Or almost never having to stand in a queue at the bank.

But what we now have is a huge flattening of our experience of life. Time, space, experience are all condensed into an ever more mono dimensional digital landscape.

Everything has been flattened into our phone and our email. Everything arrives to us through a small number of devices (and a whole lot of apps).

Ease and convenience has come at the destruction of human experience and a fully formed experience of our bodies, our minds, our sense of space and time and of ourselves.

We used to have to have a certain place to go to to make a phone call. We had to go to the market for food. We needed to write on paper and put an envelope in the post to communicate with our pen pal. And yes, email used to be fun.

Sure, you may be thinking to yourself, OMG I do not want to do all of that again. I love the convenience of the current gifts of technology. But at what expense? Has life become maybe too fast, too stressful, to flat? Is it really fun to have every piece of communication (wanted and unwanted, necessary and useless) streamed at you through your phone?

Don't you want email to be fun again?

This musing is in fact a love letter to a slower life. One where you make your life more tangible. That you unflatten your own experience.

Perhaps it's convenient and time saving to get your groceries in a standing online order and home delivered. But maybe once in a while you cancel your order and take a trip to the growers market.

Perhaps it's easy to stream every movie and binge true crime straight from the internet into your living room. But maybe this week buy a ticket to the French Film Festival and experience the cinema.

Touch, feel, experience. Allow experiences that have been flatted into a screen back into the world that is tangible in time and space. It might slow you down, but it might also fill you up.

If you’re ready to slow down with us, you might like to try one of our Friday evening Rest, Restore and Yoga Nidra sessions with Yuen or Yin with Anna.