Yesterday you had lunch with friends or family and posted a photo of your food and location to Twitter. It didn’t matter much. You put it on Twitter and didn’t care that you didn’t have a copy or didn’t post it to your own blog first, because controlling that trivial bit of content just didn’t seem important at the time.
5 years later, 10 years later, 15 years later. That lunch is magic now — a captured moment, something you wouldn’t remember and didn’t think to record elsewhere unless you keep a comprehensive private journal. Maybe it was the day before a significant event or on a trip. The true context is only revealed with hindsight.
I wrote this blog post because I wanted to follow up on my post about blogging every day, underscoring that seemingly unimportant events can carry great meaning later. Those common everyday activities that don’t seem noteworthy today? That’s our life. One after another, strung together for days and then years until we die. It’s the culture of the 21st century scattered among millions of micro posts. And it’ll be lost to time if we don’t curate it.
Yesterday was unremarkable only because we’re too close to it. Later we’ll understand that it meant everything. And if that’s true, let’s aspire to something greater than our content being sliced up and interspersed with ads on someone else’s platform.
