The Feeling of 'Dark Necessities' Song In a Nostalgic Being, Like Myself
(Edited)
This morning, I watched an Instagram reel of a young Latina woman, probably in her late twenties, skating through a tunnel in New York with a group of people. It was filmed in POV, and there was something almost ridiculously simple about it: people on inline skates, moving through the city, laughing, disappearing into the tunnel, feeling free for a few seconds. Yet it hit me harder than I expected. Maybe because I recognized something I have been missing for a long time. Not teenage rebellion, not the manufactured kind of "I'm different" attitude that MTV used to sell us, but something much quieter and more difficult to recover: the feeling that life could still surprise you. When I was fourteen or fifteen, I genuinely assumed my adult life would be more animated, more unpredictable, somehow more alive than it actually became. Then adulthood happened, as it tends to do. Stability slowly becomes the default setting. You build routines, responsibilities, habits, and little invisible walls around yourself. And one day, you realize that scrolling through Instagram can occasionally remind you of the person you thought you were going to become.
The strange part is that the reel was accompanied by the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Dark Necessities," and suddenly the whole thing became something else. I have followed the band for most of my life, so the song itself already carries emotional weight for me. But this was not simply about loving the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It was about what the song seemed to unlock. The skating, the tunnel, the movement, the flashes of freedom, the almost dreamlike imagery associated with the video, even that faint sense of idealism that surrounded it, all brought back a particular cultural atmosphere. Skate culture has always fascinated me for precisely that reason. At its best, it represents movement without a destination, freedom without needing to explain itself. You are simply going somewhere because you can. And maybe that is why watching strangers skate through a New York tunnel in 2026 made me feel strangely nostalgic for something I never actually possessed.
"Dark Necessities" came out in 2016, not 2015, and that detail makes the memory even more interesting to me because I was twenty-three by then. I was already becoming a mother, already standing on the other side of a threshold I had once imagined as impossibly far away. I remember MTV still being part of my mental landscape, but even then it felt distant, almost like something slipping through my fingers. The world represented by those videos, those songs, those images of people skating, wandering, escaping, seemed to belong to an earlier version of youth. I did not necessarily want to live inside that world. I simply wanted to feel that it was still possible. Eleven years later, in August 2026, that feeling is even more complicated. I am old enough now to understand that the past is not waiting somewhere for me. There is no secret train back to July 2015. Nostalgia is cruel precisely because it gives you the emotional coordinates of a place you cannot physically return to.
And yet, maybe that is not entirely tragic. Maybe these tiny moments are valuable because they interrupt the machinery of ordinary life. We are constantly told to change our circumstances, reinvent ourselves, take risks, refuse monotony. It sounds inspiring until you realize how much of human life is built around stability. We settle. We adapt. We become responsible for other people. We develop routines because routines make survival easier. None of that is necessarily wrong. But occasionally something as insignificant as an Instagram reel can remind you that there is still another frequency inside you. A younger version of yourself has not necessarily disappeared; perhaps she simply stopped being audible beneath everything else. For me, that reel was not really about the woman skating. I do not know her. It was about what I projected onto those few seconds: movement, freedom, possibility, and the suspicion that adulthood does not have to mean emotional stillness.
Maybe that is what "Dark Necessities" felt like this time. Not a song from my past, but a message arriving late. In 2016, I heard it while life was already becoming something different from what I had imagined at fifteen. In 2026, I hear it and understand that nostalgia is not always a desire to go backward. Sometimes it is evidence that something in us is still capable of recognizing freedom when it sees it. That is why watching someone skate through a New York tunnel on an ordinary morning affected me so much. For a few minutes, the algorithm accidentally did something almost beautiful: it placed a piece of my past beside a version of life I never lived and let me feel the distance between them. I cannot go back to being twenty-two. I cannot return to July 2015. But perhaps I do not need to. Maybe the point is simply to remember that the feeling existed, and that, somehow, it still does.
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