Treading lightly!
That’s probably the best strategy in this unknown art form called timeline travel.
Which means I am in the process of teleporting myself to 1990 until I feel I live there.

My end game is to only come to 2025 (and beyond, as this is a long-term project) to do the job of whatever online work is required.

Like how you’d go to work in the morning, but want to leave at the end of the day.

I don’t reject professional use of the internet and smartphone, but as I progress I want it to be restricted more and more, until it really feels like work.
And no longer something I do in my free-time.

Obviously, being, or not-being, online is the most identifiable area where 1990 should start feeling entirely different than 2025.

And I have been successful with this, but it is still very much in the “doing-stage”.
So my online behavior is different, but I don’t feel different.
The grey noise in my head which has become my companion, is not lifting.

A few successes have been the moments when I imagined my new-body. Sometimes I imagine my actual former 1990 body, but usually it’s easier for me to envision a body from a book from the 80s, I keep next to my bed.

I make sure not to lose sight, that this is not a body make-over challenge in any way.
Because yes, it would help if my body became the physical reminder of the fact that I am pretending it is 1990.
But the real goal is to feel the era in my mind.
It’s a brain-make-over.

I am prepared to do whatever it takes to really get that open, quiet offline consciousness that was so normal in 1990.
And I know getting offline is key to achieve that, yet so far I hardly have any 1990 progress after cutting my online presence in half.

The real results are much quieter…
Like fairies or ghosts. Glimpses that appear one moment, and that I then try to catch!
By taking on the glimpse, expanding it, living it, seeing through its eyes, by letting the images unfold like a reel;
I hope the experience grows big enough to hold to.

One of the most powerful yet largely artificial “memories” that helps me to get into the 1990 feeling, is the movie Atomic Blonde from 2017.
The movie is situated in Berlin in 1989, to the backdrop of the wall coming down.

The wardrobe of the female protagonist, as well as her London apartment, is totally minimalist, only black and white, which is of course the most timeless look the 80s produced, and would seamlessly move into 90s minimalism.
The color of the year 1990 was eggshell white.

At the time itself, I wasn’t into the combination black/white at all, but right now, and no doubt sparked by that movie Atomic Blonde, it is one of my favorite time travel tools.

Also both London as well as Berlin remind me of the era as well.
I can think of those cities, and myself in those cities in that era, and have 1990 wash over me.

I also know exactly what Madonna was up to that year.
Touring the world, which would be documented and released as her tour movie in 1991 (not mentioning the title since it depends on where you live)
And in December she would release her Immaculate Collection, which would also contain her summer hit Vogue, which was released on the album I’m Breathless, which was promoted as a soundtrack to the Dick Tracey movie instead of a studio album.
Making it a niche album, despite Vogue’s unprecedented success as a single.
The release of December’s Immaculate Collection was promoted with the to-be-banned-by-MTV single Justify my Love, which was written by Lenny Kravitz.
Justify My Love and nude photos by Steven Meisel, which were shot in December as well, were in retrospect the start of her new Erotica era.
Which would last for four years.

1990 was in many ways a landmark year.

Maybe it’s a sign of how much my brain has already eroded from all the internet use, that I still cling to being offline as my roadmap.
As if being offline is what classified the year 1990, or the decade it broke in.
It didn’t.

Just that for now at least, my brain seems too far gone to grasp the truth about this monumental year.
It is captured in its own 2025 prison of small-mindedness.

.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Books 

My diaries are available at LULU 
New books will be added.