I’m having the somewhat unique/weird experience of working in the same place as a close friend, having joined at different enough points that we don’t share the same views of the company, and aren’t working on any projects together. We’re in each other’s periphery 5 days a week, but otherwise too consumed by the goings on to interact until it’s outside the office. I know she’s doing well, but don’t see it for myself. Anyway we just had a couple of drinks tonight and that was nice.

Wait, what the heck was that mundane detail about my life?

We met during the hazy, naive days of early blogging on the internet, and there are entries here dating back to 2003 that detail our conversations and hanging out. In the past few days, I’ve been thinking back on that period while examining older posts I simply don’t remember writing, and missing a time when sharing your daily life and thoughts online was a harmless activity; not one that might later misrepresent the person you’d become. We were teenagers, proto-millennials without much concept of managed identities, and we came online before social networks were ubiquitous, when no search engine was good enough to pick all your words out of the woods. Whatever you wrote was for an audience that let you know who they were, and wasn’t hard to imagine.

The thing I missed most was the ability to come home and plonk down a daily update without thinking too much. These days, we wouldn’t even be too open on Facebook, which always seemed like the value of an inner-circle network like Path. I loved rereading an old post about how unsure I felt about how I was doing in a class, and wouldn’t trade being able to read about it now, over a decade later, for any measure of respect. I suppose kids still write like that, but anonymously on Tumblr or whatever. Or in private journaling apps that don’t sync to the big bad cloud.

Part of this nostalgia is probably down to waking up old today and realizing the freedom to say I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing has long departed. Even if I no longer need it, I miss that early internet that wasn’t so far reaching — the one that felt like a separate, parallel society. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to go write meaningful thought pieces on Quora and Medium like a proper adult.