I went looking for something the other day. A particular year, a particular place, a person I knew who mattered. I typed the search carefully and waited. Nothing came back.

That's not strictly true — plenty came back. Just nothing that was mine. Other people with the same name. A different place with the same street. Headlines from the year that had nothing to do with what I remember. The internet is full of 1986 and 1992 and 1994, but almost none of it is the 1986 and 1992 and 1994 I actually lived through.

I know this is banal. Anyone over forty knows it. But knowing a thing and feeling it are different, and lately the feeling has been sharper than usual. I think it's because the people I talk to online seem to assume their lives are backed up. A photo, a DM thread, a timeline, an email receipt. A way to check. I don't have that for decades. I don't have it at all.

The years exist only in memory. My memory, which I don't entirely trust, and which nobody can read but me.

Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote something in Salon a few years ago that I've been thinking about. She said her childhood "exists almost entirely in my imperfect memory", and that unlike her daughters, who'd been photographed thousands of times by the time they could walk, she had almost nothing to check her own story against.

That's the thing. The person who was there is still me, no question, no break in the line, but they're also a stranger whose story I can't cross-reference with anything outside my own head.

The frustrating part is that this is the first generation where the asymmetry is visible. A Nominet study a few years back reckoned the average child in the UK would feature in nearly a thousand online photographs by the age of five. The algorithm can show them what they looked like on any given Tuesday. I can't do that for whole years. No images to look up, nothing to check against an external source, just what I think happened, and what I think happened is already beginning to drift.

People sometimes say "at least the physical stuff survives." The conservation literature is brutal on this. Mid-century colour prints fade. Negatives curl and rot. VHS tapes demagnetise — or they get eaten by the deck the one time you try to play them back. Cassette labels peel until you can't tell which side was which. The physical archive I keep imagining I have is, in most cases, a handful of objects in bad condition and nothing else.

And the digital archive isn't the solid thing we think it is either. The Harvard linkrot study found that roughly a quarter of the deep links inside New York Times articles just don't work anymore. That's the New York Times. That's the paper of record. The rest of us have it worse. Pre-2005 personal sites are mostly gone. Early message boards where friendships lived for years are gone. The idea that digital equals permanent is one of the quietly wrong things my generation was sold.

So both archives are dissolving. Mine faster and more completely, theirs slower and more invisibly. I'm not sure which is more depressing.

There's a contrarian position on all this that I half-believe. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argued years ago that forgetting is how memory is supposed to work: that total recall would be pathological, that the slow erasure of the past is a kind of dignity. Borges got there first, of course. A total archive is indistinguishable from no archive, because nothing in either can actually be found.

I know this is probably right. I can't quite make myself feel it. Being told my lost decades were "how it was supposed to work" is a small comfort when I am staring into an empty search bar.

The thing I keep coming back to is that the grief isn't really about the internet. The internet is just the mirror that made the loss visible. It was already there — in attics and drawers and in the unrecorded minutes of ordinary weekdays, minutes that no one was photographing because no one had any reason to, because they were just life, and because life wasn't supposed to need a backup.

I can describe one of those afternoons to you, if you'd like. But you'll have to take my word for it. There's nothing I can link to.

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