I met him at a pub, smoking a cigarette. This is what he said to me. "You know, about 90% of missing "the old internet" is probably just nostalgia. But sometimes I fall into the old web - some old forum, and 8 years old youtube video - and I'm struck by this absurdist, simple, sort of empty aesthetic of everything. There's this almost holy ability of an old youtube video to hold onto the thought "we don't know everything, and that's fine. stuff's pretty weird, it's probably always been that way. i love you." A sort of tranquil understanding of the world that bring on this easy emphathizing with anyone, that was maybe bound to collapse, just a moment. Chesterton has this view of the "fenceless society", or the fencless religiosity: We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased. The obvious thought at Chestertons That's also something I long for when I think about the 2000s-2010s. I like to tell meself because there was more of a sense for this room back then, but most likely because in the 00-10s, I was a literal kid, who would lay on literal meadows and look up at the literal sky and think People always ask, "what's the meaning of life?" And I would think: What the fuck does that even mean?"∎