Do You Remember Who You Were Before the Algorithm?

The Mass Amnesia Crisis No One Is Talking About

Something is quietly stealing your memory, and if you're not paying attention, it might take your identity with it.

This isn't a crisis you'll see on the evening news. There are no emergency broadcasts, no breaking headlines. It's just a slow fade—a blur that's been creeping into the edges of your consciousness for years now. We're living through mass amnesia, and most of us don't even realize it's happening.

But before we dive deeper into this psychological crisis, we need to understand a phenomenon that's been quietly sweeping the internet—one that might hold the key to understanding both what we've lost and how to find our way back.

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The Rise of Liminal Spaces

Have you ever felt inexplicably drawn to images of empty malls, deserted playgrounds simmering in the evening heat, or vacant restaurants or community spaces? If so, you've encountered what the internet has come to call "liminal spaces"—a term that's exploded in popularity over the past few years, generating millions of views, countless Reddit communities, and an entire aesthetic movement.

The word "liminal" comes from the Latin "limen," meaning threshold. Anthropologists originally used it to describe transitional states in rituals—moments of being between one identity and another. But in internet culture, liminal spaces refer to physical locations that feel uncanny, nostalgic, or emotionally charged precisely because they exist between their intended purposes.

The phenomenon began gaining traction around 2019 when images of empty, fluorescent-lit spaces started circulating on platforms like Reddit and Twitter. The aesthetic struck a nerve. Posts featuring deserted Chuck E. Cheese locations, empty hotel pools, or abandoned shopping centers would rack up tens of thousands of upvotes, with comments full of people describing an inexplicable emotional response—a mixture of nostalgia, melancholy, and strange comfort.

By 2020, as the world locked down and physical spaces emptied out, the liminal space aesthetic exploded. YouTube channels dedicated to "liminal space ambience" began garnering millions of views. TikTok users created elaborate videos exploring these spaces, often accompanied by dreamy, nostalgic music. The hashtag #liminalspaces has generated hundreds of millions of views across platforms.

The phenomenon evolved beyond just empty spaces. A whole subgenre emerged of hyper-specific nostalgic scenarios: "you're in a bathroom at a 2009 house party," "you're the last person in a Blockbuster on a Friday night in 2003," "you're waiting in a dentist's office in 1997." These videos, complete with period-appropriate music bleeding through walls and authentic ambient sounds, rack up millions of views from people desperate to time-travel back to moments they may have never even experienced firsthand.

What's remarkable is how these simulated memories feel more real than actual memories for many viewers. The comments sections overflow with people saying things like "I've never been to a house party but this feels like home" or "I was born in 2005 but this makes me nostalgic for 1999." They're not just consuming content—they're trying to inhabit emotional states that algorithms can't reach, moments that existed before every experience was optimized, catalogued, and sold back to us.

The mass appeal of liminal spaces reveals something profound about our collective psychological state. These images resonate so deeply because they represent something we've been unconsciously mourning—spaces that exist outside the reach of algorithmic optimization, places that hold memories of unmonitored human experience.

There's something haunting about walking through an abandoned shopping mall at dusk. The fluorescent lights flicker overhead, casting strange shadows across empty storefronts that once bustled with life. Your footsteps echo in the vast corridors, and for a moment, you're transported back to childhood summers—before smartphones, before social media, before every moment of your day was orchestrated by invisible algorithms.

These liminal spaces call to us because they hold memories of who we used to be. They're emotional archaeology sites, preserving fragments of a world where human connection wasn't mediated by code, where boredom was allowed to exist, where thoughts could unfold without interruption.

But there's something deeper happening here. Liminal spaces are becoming increasingly soothing to people in ways that would have seemed strange just a decade ago. Why do millions of us now find comfort in images of empty office buildings, deserted playgrounds at twilight, or vacant school hallways during summer break?

It's because these spaces represent the last physical remnants of a pre-algorithmic world. They're temples to a time when social connections formed organically—when you might strike up a conversation with a stranger in a food court without wondering about their political affiliations, their online presence, or their potential to become content for your social media. These were spaces where people gathered not because an app suggested they should, but because they simply existed in the same physical reality.

Look at an empty playground at golden hour and your nervous system recognizes something it's been desperately missing: the memory of unstructured time, of play that wasn't optimized, of childhood friendships that formed through proximity and shared boredom rather than curated interests and parental networking. These spaces whisper of summer evenings when kids played until the streetlights came on, when "hanging out" didn't require planning or documentation.

The empty mall represents something even more profound: a time when our desires weren't quite so precisely mapped and manipulated. Yes, consumerism existed, but it was blunt and obvious compared to today's personalized psychological targeting. You walked through a mall and saw the same stores everyone else saw. Your teenage identity crisis played out in physical spaces with real friends, not in algorithmic echo chambers designed to amplify and monetize your insecurities.

These liminal spaces also represent the last gasps of a genuinely shared culture. The school hallway, the mall, the community pool—these were spaces where people from different backgrounds, different beliefs, different economic situations still occupied the same physical reality. Before everything became politicized, before every space became a battlefield for competing ideologies, before every interaction became a performance for invisible audiences.

We're drawn to liminal spaces because they're the closest thing we have to time machines—physical locations that still hold the emotional residue of a world where you could exist without being constantly surveilled, analyzed, and optimized.

YouTube is flooded with "liminal space ambience" videos—hours of ambient sound designed to simulate these forgotten places. And what are they titled? "Places You Shouldn't Be." "Spaces That Feel Wrong." "Backrooms - Don't Stay Too Long."

Many creators of these video genuinely understand the profound comfort these spaces provide. They're not deliberately trying to trap you in digital consumption—they're often just as nostalgic and displaced as their viewers. But they've inadvertently become perfect showcases of something much more sinister.

The title "Places You Shouldn't Be" works on two levels. On the surface, it refers to the physical transgression—the abandoned mall after hours, the empty school during summer, the deserted office building at night. These are literally places you're not supposed to be, spaces that exist outside normal operating hours, outside official permission.

But on a deeper, more psychological level, these titles reveal the real truth: the state of mind these spaces represent is exactly the state of mind you're not supposed to be in. The contemplative quiet, the unmonitored solitude, the freedom from algorithmic input—this is the mental territory they don't want you occupying.

Recently, I stood on a hill next to Zurich’s airport watching planes landing and departing. My mind wasn’t being harvested. My attention wasn’t being sold. My emotions weren’t being catalogued and commodified. I was existing in a space that generates no data, produced no engagement metrics, offered no opportunities for targeted advertising, but was enjoyable to me for no other reason than my obsession with planes.

This is the state of consciousness that threatens their entire agenda. Not the physical spaces themselves, but the mental space they create—unmonitored, unoptimized, uncommercial consciousness.

The YouTube creators stumbled onto this truth without necessarily understanding its full implications. They're selling you back your own nostalgia while simultaneously warning you away from it, creating a perfect metaphor for the entire digital economy: monetizing your desire to escape while keeping you trapped in the very system you're trying to flee.

Do you remember the last time you sat in complete silence? Not the manufactured quiet of noise-canceling headphones, but real silence—the kind that makes your own thoughts audible again? When did you last have a conversation that wasn't interrupted by the ping of notifications, the urge to document the moment, or the nagging feeling that you should be somewhere else, doing something more productive?

This is what we've lost, and we didn't even notice it disappearing.

If your mind's been foggy lately, if you've felt off, unfocused, or not quite yourself, you are not alone. This is an invitation—not to panic, but to notice. To pull back the curtain on what's been quietly reshaping your inner world without your permission.

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When Memory Becomes Disappearing Ink

Most people think they're making choices: what to read, what to feel, what matters to them. But what if it's all been curated?

These algorithms know exactly what sparks your anger, what's going to set you off. They know when you're lonely. They can predict the precise moment you're going to crave attention or validation. And once they know that, they don't just show you what you want to see—they build who you become.

AI doesn't wait to see who you are. It decides which options you'll even encounter—the news stories, the trends, the products, the people. You think you're browsing freely, but you're being led somewhere specific, guided by a reality manufactured by code you'll never read, engineered by systems you never truly consented to.

Your instincts start to dull. Your beliefs soften into silence. And it's not done through force—that would be too obvious. Instead, you first feel numb, constantly reactive. You might swing between apathy and agitation without clear causes. Your nervous system becomes overstimulated by artificial inputs it was never designed to process.

We are scrolling, swiping, clicking, and reacting on autopilot. Being alone with no music and no internet feels almost unbearable.

Here's what modern neuroscience reveals about our predicament: without deep, undistracted focus, our brains can't transfer short-term experiences into long-term memory. It's as if our lives are now being written in disappearing ink.

You might not be able to recall specific conversations from last month, or capture the feeling of a particular afternoon last year. It's a breakdown in memory encoding. One forgotten degree here, another lost moment there. Your attention fragments into a thousand pieces. Psychologists call this cognitive drift, but in our current era, it's something much darker.

You don't just forget moments. You forget identity. You forget yourself.

How do you know if this is happening to you? Maybe you used to be curious, passionate, driven—and now those traits feel like something distant that you can't quite grasp anymore. You start to believe that none of it really matters. Meaning begins fading, and apathy starts spreading like fog.

What we're talking about here is not burnout. This is the final symptom: the self becomes vulnerable, malleable, ready to be rewritten. And at that moment, they can write your story for you.

The Symptoms of Digital Amnesia

The signs are everywhere once you start looking:

The Passion Fade: Interests that once consumed you now feel distant, like they belonged to someone else. That novel you were writing, the instrument you loved playing, the conversations that used to energize you—they all feel somehow smaller now, less urgent, less real.

The Meaning Drain: Things that used to matter deeply now feel arbitrary. Your values become flexible, your convictions softer. You catch yourself saying "I don't really care" about things you once fought for.

The Presence Problem: Being alone with your thoughts becomes unbearable. Silence creates anxiety. You reach for your phone not because you want to connect with someone, but because you can't stand to be alone with yourself.

The Memory Gaps: You struggle to recall not just events, but emotions, sensations, the texture of experiences. Your past feels flat, like a photograph rather than a lived reality.

The Reactive Life: You find yourself constantly responding to external stimuli rather than generating your own thoughts, making your own choices, following your own curiosity.

The Simulation Trap: You start consuming simulations of the experiences you're missing instead of actually having them. You watch videos of cozy rooms instead of creating cozy spaces. You listen to "study with me" streams instead of studying. You consume content about self-improvement instead of improving yourself. The algorithm feeds you endless substitutes for actual living.

The Nostalgia Hijack: Your longing for authentic experience gets redirected into content consumption. You watch videos titled "90s kids will remember" or "simpler times" while the very act of watching keeps you trapped in the complexity you're trying to escape. They're selling you your own memories back to you as products.

This is the architecture of forgetting, and it's working exactly as designed. They've even found a way to monetize your awareness of what you've lost.

The Blueprint

Here's the part they're terrified you'll figure out: If they can fracture your memory, they can fracture your identity. And if they fracture your identity, they don't need to control you anymore—you'll do it for them, all by yourself.

They've turned your deepest human needs into content categories. Loneliness becomes "lo-fi hip hop to study/relax to." The need for purpose becomes "productivity porn" and "self-improvement" videos that keep you watching instead of doing. Your desire for authentic connection becomes parasocial relationships with influencers and streamers. Your longing for meaning becomes endless spiritual and philosophical content that substitutes thinking about life for actually living it.

They've even gamified your awareness of the problem. There are now countless videos about "digital minimalism”, “frugal living”, and "dopamine detox" that keep you scrolling while pretending to address your scrolling addiction. They've monetized your desire to escape their system by turning that escape into another part of their system.

The most insidious part? They've made you feel like the problem is you. Like you lack willpower, like you're addicted, like you need their tools and apps and systems to fix yourself. But you're not broken—you're responding normally to an abnormal environment designed to capture and redirect your attention.

Once you stop remembering who you are, you'll buy any story they give you. You'll think it was always this way. You'll think your silence was your own idea. You'll think the numbness is just life.

But here's the truth they absolutely cannot delete: Behind that fog, you are still in there. You don't need a guru. You don't need another system. You don't need to escape the matrix. You just need to remember what they work so hard to make you forget.

Your thoughts are your territory. Your attention is your weapon. Your memory is the map back home.

And above all: your sense of self is not theirs to edit.

This is where the concept of a "liminal summer" becomes revolutionary.

A Liminal Summer

Remember when summer felt infinite? Not infinite like it would last forever—if anything, it always passed by far too quickly—but infinite in that each day felt separate from time. As a kid, summer was a liminal space as well, a time between who you were and who you could become. At its best, it had minimal responsibilities, limitless opportunities, and was guaranteed to fundamentally change you.