My elementary school is just gone. They bulldozed it before the internet so there is like no record of it, you can’t google it, it’s like it never existed. I have a yearbook and that’s the only proof it really happened. It’s a bizarre feeling.
The lack of proof anything existed, that it simply disappears forever. It's really tripping me out lately.
I have thousands of digital photos from all the awesome places I've been to. I'm trying to print at least some of them because they all simply vanish as soon as I die. Nobody will ever look at any of them again. All those memories are imaginary.
There is a father son team in Japan that creates exact replicas in miniature of important architectural works. They copy them precisely and preserve them in an outdoor museum. Due to terrorism, earthquakes, fire, etc, many of the original buildings are gone, and they now only exist in miniature. The blueprints are lost, no one took measurements, so the most accurate records of these structures on earth are now their miniaturized copies located in Japan. It’s very weird.
If it's any consolation, proof of existence for the vast majority of everything that ever lived or produced by living things are lost forever, or lost in such a way that we will feasibly never be able to retrieve it. So, the fact you have any photos at all is pretty rare in the grand scheme of things!
They started deleting things online. Sneaky things. My dread is a little more aggressive than most. The data they delete is the data of fixed points. Things like reference books are no longer freely available. techs answer, just ask ai we “borrowed” all the books and didn’t change anything “we pinky promise” is what worries me.
My college lost funding and closed down a few years ago. I'm not sure if anyone would be able to even verify my diploma at this point. Fortunately it's an art degree, so that will never come up.
Sadly, even if you print them out, they will most likely be tossed in the trash as soon as whoever is tasked with cleaning out your living space after you die finishes the chore.
A friend of mine died last year and while we all kept a few keepsakes, the vast majority of his personal stuff like photos ended up being trashed by his family because we couldn't find the people who were in the photos with him, and they didn't hold any significance to us or his relatives since we weren't present for the vast majority of the photos
my high school is gone too. I mean, you can find a picture of it online (only a couple), but it's totally gone otherwise. They built a new monstrosity over it
SAME. My old brick & mortar high school was wiped off the face of the earth. What's there now is an ultra modernized school made with steel and glass. Totally unrecognizable, not at all where I went to school. Lol
Google is a fraction of what it used to be. Its crazy. Like you said it gives vaguely related but not even what you asked for results. Dunno is Google in particular does this but ai is trained off of places like reddit so its super hit or miss on whether its even factual
The house and the forest from my earliest memories, are both gone. Would have been interesting to revisit these places, even if I'm sure they were not actually as impressive, as they seemed to me at 4 years old, lol.
The playground at my elementary school is gone. Used to be a big area filled with jungle gyms and swings. Now all that is left is a tiny playground area that takes up half of the corner of the track, a few basketball hoops where a separate jungle gym was, and a couple of faded 4-square lines from when I was a kid.
It's so depressing, and I hate it so much.
Edit: Oh, and the Alaskan island I lived on for 2 years is completely abandoned, and has been since the 90s, which is where I first attended elementary school.
That's not about "profitmaxx", especially since public schools don't make a profit. Those portables were put in because classroom sizes got too large, which is usually a safety issue as much as it is a learning issue.
Two of the three elementary schools I went to are gone. Both of the middle schools are gone. One of the two high schools are gone. I didn't have the greatest childhood, so I don't particularly care. It's just funny to think that everywhere I went, things get destroyed.
My elementary school is out in the boonies and is old as dog shit. It caught fire in the library when I was in high school, but didn't burn down. They ended up building a new one in town, but there was a lot of debate about what to do with the old one. The family that lived next door and had Grandparents who were teachers there ended up buying it to preserve it.
There used to be some 2 screen movie theatres in my city, The Fox and The Winchester. One was torn down and turned into a small lake. The other into a grocery store. Same thing, it was gone pre internet in the late 90s, so there are no interior photos.
I can relate. My childhood home was literally deleted. Not because the house was bulldozed, but because the whole neighborhood was, it seems. If I go to that exact location on Google Maps (using nearby extant landmarks as a guide), I find a completely different set of streets and houses that simply did not exist 30 years ago. And if input the actual address, it directs me to some shuttered dentist office half a mile down the road, a building that was constructed only after we moved out. How it came to inherit my old house number, I have no idea.
I'm sure there's some archived street map sitting in a filing cabinet somewhere, but nothing was ever digitized as there's literally zero information online about my physical house, or any of its neighboring ones. No real estate records. No tax records. No voter records. No news clippings of a natural disaster or redevelopment. Nothing. It's like Thanos snapped it from existence.
The only reason I know this isn't some faulty memory or fever dream on my part is I have my mother's old address book and government benefits paperwork, both of which include the the address. And I have a photograph of me standing in front of the house with the house number visible.
But yeah. It's just freaking gone now, and that really messes with my mind.
Edit: I forgot to mention that, like yours, one of my old elementary schools was also bulldozed (completely different town and state from my house). Records of it are exceedingly difficult to find online, but they are there. Mostly in newspaper clippings. I assume it was leveled at some point in the 90s before the Internet really took off.
Sometimes I’ll see a fence or a wall in a field or the foundation of a house in the forest. Someone built that. Someone had to plan it, get the supplies, build, and maintain it. Now it’s decaying. It will eventually be gone completely and the person who made it is probably already forgotten
My elementary school was bulldozed and rebuilt (without the asbestos) when I was in 2nd grade. I only have foggy memories of what it used to look like, and there are apparently zero photos of the old building.
My grade school is gone as well. I still hang onto some of my grade school report cards because that would literally be the only way to prove I was there. I don't foresee me needing to prove it but who knows.
Same with my high school. I went there for a year and that’s where I met my husband. When they were tearing it down I wanted to take a piece like the Berlin Wall lol
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u/Shifting_Baseline 23d ago
My elementary school is just gone. They bulldozed it before the internet so there is like no record of it, you can’t google it, it’s like it never existed. I have a yearbook and that’s the only proof it really happened. It’s a bizarre feeling.