Blogging in 2026: Chasing Nostalgia and Ramen in Paper Bowls.

My sun and my moon are ruled by nostalgia and a chase. I am someone who is always running after a feeling and an energy, trying to capture and recreate something I have a hard time describing in words. I chase after colors and sounds and objects and places that are reminiscent of a moment or scene and want to save every indescribable emotion from it.

For example, a memory from a summer in my early twenties: the smell of monsoon on pavement, cooling off the hot air and turning it sticky and warm. I remember sitting outside on a patio, eating ramen in a paper bowl from a food truck outside the indie theater where we were catching a movie that used so many vibrant green tones in the cinematography. The late afternoon sky is purple and gray and pink in the giant clouds rolling overhead. It’s still hot enough to make me sweat through my tank top, but the cloud cover and rain brought out a faint breeze. I can feel it moving the hair through my scalp and bringing the smell of creosote. The hot ramen makes me sweat even more. The movie made me crave a vacation somewhere green and lush. The puddles on the sidewalk reflect the color of the sky.

My vice is daydreaming and fantasizing through rose-colored glasses about moments like these. Collecting these scenes like movie stills in my mind, I’m in a constant challenge trying to examine them under a microscope so that I can figure out how to either recreate them or memorialize them in some way in my life.

I fall victim to nostalgia constantly. I’m a luddite in many ways, loyal to inefficiency and dedicated to building out ideals that often make my life a lot more difficult. The chase is part of the addiction, too. The yearning, the seeking, the wondering why nothing feels quite the right way at this moment, now.

A TV show I was watching this week had a line that stuck in my head, where the character notices that people who yearn for the past do so because they’re anxious about their future. Perhaps my hard-headed ideals on buying everything secondhand is a reflection on the anxiety I feel about the state of ecommerce and this newer wave of internet capitalism. I use film for my personal photography projects and I hate everything AI generated. I’m feeling guilty as I type this in a Google doc because I’m worried what machine learning trap this corporation is going to do with the words I’m putting down.

I want to start blogging again because I have nostalgia for an era where reading someone’s words and photos and thoughts was the entire goal. I sometimes balk when I read the comments on a personal essay or post on social media where the author writes about something simple and interesting to them but is not designed to cater to a mass audience. I think enjoying someone’s writing style or voice is enjoyable enough to read in itself, even if the subject matter is nothing exceptional or new or personalized to my own interests.

Since rose-colored glasses are designed to see only the best of the memory it’s recalling, not necessarily what was true, that era likely didn’t exist in the same way I’m remembering so it might be more accurate to say that I’m wanting do something because I enjoy it and it feels good to share. I don’t want to create a brand or niche or optimize anything because so much of my life is starting to get swallowed up in algorithms and advertisements. The future online is making me anxious, so I’m soothing myself in fantasies of the past.

I want to write about the goofy little trinkets I found at the thrift store and the recipes I failed at and the anger I feel about the political landscape and a poem I wrote in the bathtub in the same place and not care that there is no point. Not having a goal is the point, and writing it and sharing it is enough.

I once read an article in an online magazine about the author’s journey to finding a mystery ingredient in an old recipe from his childhood that is no longer manufactured. The end result was just that he was told how to recreate it with modern ingredients, but the entire piece, to me, was a fun read into his journey learning the history of this ingredient’s manufacturing and how much he craved this nostalgic, exact taste in his memory so much that it inspired his whole months long investigation.

The top comments were, of course, “Slow news day?” “This could have been a tweet.” “Why would anyone besides you care?”