About yeerbook.

Every December, I try to do the same thing.

I open my camera roll, go all the way back to January, and try to reflect on the moments and people who shaped my year, so I can send them a message.

But the real moments are buried in thousands of random screenshots, receipts, and near-duplicates. Trying to catch up with everyone quickly becomes overwhelming.

Living in Japan for more than a decade gave me another way to think about it.

Every December, people used to send nengajo, New Year’s postcards written to the people who mattered to them that year. Not a generic holiday card, but a personal note, written and received in the hundreds across the country every December. I loved the idea immediately: a whole culture built around pausing once a year to tell people what they mean to you.

The tradition has faded. Not because people stopped caring about each other, but because the personal part became harder to preserve. A handwritten note became a text. A personal update became a group message copied and sent to everyone at once.

Convenience slowly replaced intention.

Around the same time, I stepped back from social media, because it started to feel like everything on the feed was built for an audience instead of for each other. An inside joke. A quiet afternoon that meant something to three people and nobody else. Those moments were never meant to be performed, so they never made it online. The photos lived in texts and group chats instead, and eventually got buried there too.

I tried journaling, more than once.

That never quite worked either. My private thoughts lived in one app, the moments I wanted to share with friends lived somewhere else, and neither one captured the whole picture: what happened, what I was thinking, and who was actually there.

Eventually, I realized I wasn’t looking for another place to store memories.

I wanted a way to hold a year.

We tend to think of our life story as something we’ll get to eventually, a memoir, a conversation with our kids when we’re older, maybe a box of photographs. But every year we’re actually living is already a story of its own, with its own people, its own ordinary days, and its own moments we don’t realize will matter until later.

I wanted something real I could hold at the end of it.

Proof that this year happened.

And that it mattered.

Maybe growing up in the 90s and 2000s has something to do with it too. I miss having physical memories, real photo albums, an actual high school yearbook you could pick up years later and flip through. After school, nothing really organizes a year for you anymore. There’s no yearbook committee, no class photo, no fixed milestone that tells everyone, this is the year we’re going to remember.

But your life is still full of people who were there.

So I wanted to make something that could bring those things together.

That’s why I built yeerbook.

You can add photos and reflections throughout the year, whenever something feels worth keeping. Or, if you’re like me, you can sit down at the end of the year and build the whole thing in one go.

When a memory involves someone else, you can tag them to add their own note, voice message, or photo directly onto that page. They don’t need an account.

At the end, it becomes something physical: a book of your year, made up of the moments and people who were actually part of it.

I’m building yeerbook on my own, starting with the people in my own life before anyone else.

If any of this sounds familiar, I’d love for you to be one of the first people to make one.

yeerbook isn’t social media. It’s not another feed to keep up with, and it’s not another place to perform your life.

It’s a place to remember it.

The year you lived. Bound and signed.