In Ten Years: Perfection Turned Nostalgia
It’s 5:30am on any ordinary day in 2016. I’m lacing up for a run: the kind where I don’t have any knowledge of intensity minutes, or that readiness scores from a ring exist.
Halfway down the street, the sun breaks over the tree line. It’s one of those sunrises that feels like a nudge from God; a quiet explosion of apricot and gold. I stop, catch my breath, and pull out my iPod Touch. My thumb instinctively turns the device sideways.
That’s just how we did it then. We shot the world horizontally because that’s how our eyes worked. That’s how we were taught to shoot by the way cameras were constructed. This allowed us to capture the actual width of a place, the way the light spilled out to the left and right. There were no “Stories” to fill back then, no vertical dimensions to meet.
I snapped a photo that was probably forty percent lens flare, posted it to a feed that still moved in chronological order, and then… kept running. I didn’t check the stats until after the run. I only cared about whether the run felt good, or if it didn’t.
Ten years later, my hands have been re-educated, as have yours.
Now, when I see something beautiful, I hold the phone vertically, framing the world into a narrow, upright rectangle: a shape designed for the scroll, not the horizon. In all honestly, I’m probably not capturing the view anymore; instead, I’m capturing one fraction of a day’s story waiting to be told.
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I wonder if we’ve been conditioned to shift from being a person experiencing a moment, to being a producer on a set.
It’s not that life in 2026 is bad. In so many ways, it’s easier, more connected, and more efficient than we ever imagined back then. But there’s a specific kind of fatigue that sets in when even a quiet sunset feels like something we should do something with — whether that’s snapping the perfect shot or just finding the right words to describe it later.
I think that’s why so many of us are looking back at 2016 right now. Is it just to see how we looked or what we were doing a decade ago? Maybe.
I think it’s also because we miss being unoptimized.
Ten years later, we know AI can make an almost perfect picture of a sunset, but it can’t make you feel the breeze or the sun on your face. It can’t replicate those small, random moments that happen when you’re just in the moment, and not worried about how it looks on a screen. After all, a life well-lived isn’t a gallery to be viewed; it’s a series of smudged, blurry, and beautiful encounters that don’t need a like to feel real.
But I admit: I’m as guilty as anyone else who loves to share bits and pieces of their lives. I’ve always been a storyteller, and as time went by, I’ve adjusted to different platforms. Part of having a photographic memory means always wanting evidence of what I’ve done, who I’ve hung out with, and where I’ve been.
However, maybe the move in 2026 is to give ourselves permission to show up for an impromptu coffee meetup — complete with lipgloss-stained cups — and have the kind of low-res conversations that don’t need a specific point or a polished takeaway. We can still post the highlights, but we can also reclaim that wide-angle view (hello, Kodak Charmera?) and find some joy in the things that don’t even need to be shared.
The horizon is still there, exactly like it looked in 2016. It’s wide, it’s explosive, and at its core, gloriously uncurated.
All we have to do is turn our heads — and maybe our phones — to see that the best parts of our story are the ones we aren’t even trying to tell.
