Time Travel

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OmegaFax

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I sat down and spent a good part of the afternoon uncovering that I had pretty much a day-to-day account of most of my adult life. Search history going back to at least 2009. Social networks, forums, bookmarks, IM and IRC logs, old contacts, iCal archives, contact archives, e-mails, videos, annotations, journal entries, photos that go even further.

List could go on.

It was how I responded to people and reacted to situations. Insignificant things to hurtful things to extraordinary things. Things buried and forgotten. There's the saying that if you travel far enough, you'll eventually meet yourself. I started reading messages I'd written to people a decade ago and felt I went full circle. It was an uneasy feeling like a place I shouldn't go.

After skimming through a transcript, I stopped and asked myself if I needed to really go back to who I was and run it up to speed with who I am now. It's been running around in my head that maybe the last 10 or 15 years with the internet may have painted the most detailed day-to-day picture of humanity.

Guess the question is ... do you look back? Is it surprising or shocking to see the person you were and who you are now? Does it even matter? Do these things need to stay with us?

Exterminate if too metaphysical.
 
I make a point of erasing everything that might indicate as to which kind of person i was before now. Photos, videos, dropbox stuff, social media, browser history, a lot of stuff. The least i can find out about my past the better.

So no, i don't.
 
I found my old e-mail account from high school. Found some old (between 10 and 12 years ago) e-mails between me and my first girlfriend, and some old friends. Yeah, couldn't keep on reading after a while. The version of 15-year old me that's in my head doesn't really agree with what was in those e-mails. It was funny, but also sad, in a way.

Similarly, during one of my last nights as a university students, one of my friends showed some pictures from the first few weekends we had together when we started. It was insane - it feels like it wasn't that long ago (and I guess it wasn't), but man. We were kids! So much happened in those couple of years. Not every choice I made was a good one.

I try to stay away from that stuff for now. I'm not quite where I want to be in life, so I just want to focus on what's ahead. I can imagine that there will be benefits to having so much about yourself handy when you're older though. I never really had much of an online presence that can be traced back to the real me though.
 
I've often thought that history majors in the future will probably have research assignments on private individuals from today, pouring over their metadata and chat histories after they are de-classified by Google or the NSA in 80+ years or whatever.
 
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