Here's a number I can't stop thinking about.
In the last three months my reels got shared about 219,000 times.
Shared, not viewed. Someone watched it, felt something, and picked a person to send it to.
Views are nice. But a view can be someone half asleep on the couch with their thumb moving. A share is a decision. It's someone going "you need to see this" to their mum, their brother, or the Year 10 group chat that only wakes up for birthdays and stuff like this.
The maths
Say each share lands in a chat with five people in it. That's over a million people who saw one of my reels because someone they know sent it to them. A mate sent it, not an algorithm.
The 1983 one got sent 74,000 times on its own.
Across those three months, 3.7 million different accounts watched. Add the group chats, the family Facebook pages and the screenshots that never get counted, and it genuinely starts to feel like everyone in Australia has seen one at least once.
So why is it slowing down?
The last few haven't travelled like 1983 did. My latest one, waking up in 2001, did 13,000 views. That's a rounding error next to two million.
I don't think people stopped caring. I think a lot of them already did the thing. You already sent your mum the milk bar one. Your school chat already had its "be home before dark" moment. There's only so many times you can send the same feeling to the same people before it's just another one.
What's next
That's the bit I haven't fully figured out. But I don't think this is the end of something. I think it's the start.
Because here's what 219,000 shares actually tells me. People are hungry for something. Not the stuff itself, nobody really wants a Nokia back. They miss how it felt. Boredom. Riding your bike till the streetlights came on. A whole street of kids who knew each other's names. Dinner at the table because there was nothing else to do.
Nostalgia gets written off as soft. I reckon it's one of the most powerful things we've got. It reminds people what they actually value, and once you remember what you value, you start choosing differently. You put the phone down at dinner. You let your kids get bored. You knock on a neighbour's door.
That's culture shaping stuff. And it's not only an Australian thing. Every country had a version of the backyard and the streetlights and the milk bar.
So maybe I haven't run out of Australians. Maybe the next bit is helping people bring a little of that world back into this one.
I'm keen to find out. Hit reply and tell me the one thing from back then you'd bring back if you could.
Sammy