There’s a kind of grief that doesn’t announce itself.
It doesn’t come from a breakup or a death. It doesn’t have a name you can say out loud. It just lingers in the pauses between notifications, in the ache behind your eyes after too many hours scrolling, in the sudden nostalgia for a world that wasn’t trying so hard to sell itself back to you.
A world that felt real.
Fuzzy around the edges, maybe, but real.
If you were born in the ’80s or ’90s, you probably know what I mean.
We were the last to feel the world before it was filtered, flattened, and fed into an algorithm.
We didn’t have words for it then. We just lived it.
We built our personalities through burned CDs, AIM away messages and Xanga html themes.
We wandered neighborhoods just to feel the wind in our hair and the grass under our feet.
We lived offline without calling it “disconnecting.”
And when the internet came, it felt like magic, not a trap.
It was weird, wild, deeply human.
Made by people who wanted to be there, not corporations mining attention.
It wasn’t trying to make us something.
It just was.
We didn’t know we were closing the door to that world the last time we logged out of MSN.
We didn’t know the last time we’d meet up without texting first would be… the last time.
Then came the phones.
Then the surveillance.
Then the social contracts quietly rewritten by updates we didn’t read.
Now we’re here: watching AI accelerate at a pace that leaves even the tech-savvy breathless.
We’ve gone from curiosity to dependency in record time.
We’re in the uncanny valley now, where the line between real and artificial is blurring faster than we can make peace with it.
And maybe you’re tired.
Maybe you’re overwhelmed.
Maybe you find yourself asking: When did it all go wrong?
Maybe what you’re really feeling is digital burnout.
But here’s the truth, and it might hurt a little:
It didn’t go wrong. It just went.
Technology evolved. Capitalism did what capitalism does.
But we forgot to anchor ourselves in the storm.
We forgot how to pause.
How to protect wonder.
How to remember.
That low-grade exhaustion you carry? The way your brain feels like tabs you forgot to close? That’s digital burnout, too. It’s not just about tech fatigue: it’s soul fatigue. A weariness from being always reachable, always watching, always watched.
But… the flame is still there. Underneath the noise. Beneath the overstimulation. Behind the screen.
And that’s what The Remembering Flame is about.
It’s not a rejection of technology. It’s not a demand to go back.
It’s a soft rebellion. A call to presence.
A reminder that your inner world does not need to be branded, optimized, or rendered in HD to be worthy.
Because you are not an algorithm.
You are a pulse. A presence. A poem.
So yes… grieve the slow death of eye contact.
Mourn the mystery we lost when everything became searchable.
Feel the ache for a world where your memories weren’t stored in clouds.
But don’t stop there.
Let that grief become a guide.
Let it point you back to the places in you that still remember.
The parts that refuse to be automated.
The ones that still light up when you walk barefoot through the grass, or hear a song you haven’t heard since 2003.
Let yourself be the one who notices.
The one who slows down.
The one who stays human: on purpose.
Because digital burnout doesn’t mean you’re broken.
It means you’re still awake.
Still feeling.
Still choosing.
And soon, when we can’t trust what we see, we will still be able to trust what we feel.
That is the remembering.
That is the flame.
And it lives in you.