Back (of our minds)rooms: Our Inescapable Minds
Hello reader. Today I found an old Google doc from September 2024 I had spent probably hours typing out, but never posted to this blog. At the time I wrote it, I was probably going down a Backrooms rabbit hole, just like I am now that the movie has come out and my love for the Backrooms, though always alive within me, has been totally invigorated.
Anyway, here is what I had to say one and a half years ago…
The Backrooms are literally a manifestation of every kid from the 90s and 2000s collective memory, and Kane’s rendition of them is a metaphor for that. The bacteria monster is a symbol of our own brainrot, trapped thinking about our childhoods and never escaping the longing for those simpler days.
The more people think about their own memories, the more we mess with the back of our minds, the more people no-clip into those memories and can’t escape.
When we think about our memories, we manifest the backrooms, which are a distortion of our memories. Things look strange in the backrooms because it is common for people to misremember things, so the way we see things in the backrooms is the way we see things in our minds.
We just want to go “home,” which for us, means the days when life was easier and we didn’t have so much to worry about. We could go outside and play, our parents took care of us, even our relationships with our parents were simpler.
But, we know we can’t go “home,” we know there is no escape from adulthood. We also know there is no escape from our memories. There is no hope of escaping this hellscape of our own making. We fabricate our memories and we don’t even allow ourselves to take comfort in them–what a scam.
We see adulthood as a problem that we can’t overcome instead of simply a state of being we can enjoy, albeit differently than the way we enjoyed our childhoods.
I too have subjected myself to this way of thinking. There are a lot of things about my childhood that I really miss, like going out on the swingset in my backyard every single day with my earbuds in, listening to songs from my iPod. I miss the way my house looked back then, full of life. I don’t live in my childhood home anymore and my dad spends his days there alone.
I miss my mom. I miss having a problem and talking to her about it. I miss the way she held me when I cried. I really miss hearing her voice.
The Backrooms manifest differently in all of us, but somehow, the Backrooms videos I see on the internet show a collection of places where we experienced our childhood memories. We see playgrounds and think of the ones we grew up playing on. We see a school hallway and remember when we used to walk from class to class. We see a storefront and think of the malls we used to shop in, many of which have since shut down.
What I see in the Backrooms on the internet is a collective memory that everyone my age contributes to. I see endless longing for the past, sometimes even eras of the past we weren’t alive for, because life always seems better in the past. It’s hard to see the good that has come from the present because all of our lives are hard in some way. It’s difficult to appreciate what we have now that we didn’t have back then.
The Backrooms can trap us if we aren’t careful and no-clip out of reality in the wrong places (our distorted memories). Remember to appreciate what is good about your life now.
Sure, it’s okay to remember the past, but eventually, we have to move on.
Thank you for coming to my ted talk.