About yeerbook.
Every December, I try to do the same thing: look back through my camera roll and remember the year I just lived.
The real moments, though, are buried in thousands of random screenshots, receipts, and near-duplicates. Trying to reconstruct a year from scattered fragments quickly becomes overwhelming.
Living in Japan for more than a decade showed me a different way of thinking about the end of a year.
Every December, people have traditionally written nengajo, New Year’s postcards sent to the people who mattered to them that year. Not a generic holiday card, but a personal note and gesture of gratitude, sent and received by the dozens across the country. I loved the idea: a tradition built around pausing once a year to show gratitude to the people who walked beside you.
Over time, though, the ritual has changed. The handwritten postcard has increasingly given way to texts, group messages, and digital greetings. Convenience made staying in touch easier, but it also made personal gestures easier to replace with something generic.
I noticed the same shift in my own life. I’ve stepped back from social media for several years, because it started to feel like everything on the feed was built for an audience instead of for each other. An inside joke or a quiet afternoon might mean something deeply to three people and nothing at all to everyone 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, but 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 often imagine our life story as something we’ll put together later: a memoir, stories we tell our children, perhaps an attic box of photographs. But every year we live is already a story of its own, with its own people, places, and moments that may never come together again in quite the same way.
I wanted something real I could hold at the end of it: a physical record 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 things that held 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.
Maybe that’s why the old yearbook tradition has always made sense to me. The school provided the structure, but what people actually kept was the record of the people and moments they shared. Long before the school yearbook existed, people were already keeping personal books of friends and memories. I wanted to bring that idea back to life.
That’s why I built yeerbook.
You can add photos and reflections throughout the year, whenever something feels worth keeping, or build it at your own pace at the end of the year.
Not just a caption next to a photo, but whatever you want to remember about the moment: what happened, what you were thinking or feeling, why it mattered, and who was there.
When a memory involves someone else, you can invite them to “sign” that moment. They can leave their own mark with handwriting, notes, doodles, and photo stickers directly on the page. They don’t need an account or an app.
At the end, it becomes something physical: a hardcover book of your year, made up of the moments and people who shaped it.
I’m building yeerbook on my own, starting with the people in my own life before anyone else. And if we ever cross paths and share a meaningful memory, I’d be glad to have you sign my book.
If any of this resonates with you, I’d love for you to be one of the first people to make a yeerbook.
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.
