With Instagram, self-defining and self-worth-measuring spilled over into the rest of the day, eventually becoming my default mode. I would keep scrolling as though the cure for how I felt was at the bottom of my feed. The landscapes I once Photoshopped my way into were materializing around me. There were a million versions of all of us running around in one another’s heads.

I recently stumbled upon this tweet from Aaron Lewis: “what if old tweets were displayed with the profile pic you had at the time of posting. a way to differentiate between past and present selves.” ​ I’m going to set aside for now an obviously and integrally related matter: to what degree should our present self be held responsible for the utterances of an older iteration of the self that resurface through the operations of our new memory machines? ​ What I’m reading into Lewis’s proposal then is an impulse, not at all unwarranted, to reassert a measure of agency over the operations of digitally mediated memory. ​ Yes, that was me as I was, but that is no longer me as I now am, and this critical difference was implicit in the evolution of my physical appearance, which signaled as much to all who saw me. No such signals are available to the self as it exists online.

We can be all of these things as we grow into adulthood, but I experienced them so much differently as a father, watching my girls live them. ​ I'm not sure how thinking about this distinction will affect future me. I hope that it will help me to appreciate everyone in my life, especially my daughters and my wife, a bit more for who they are and who they have been. Maybe it will even help me be more generous to 2019 me.