I started Dear Future to tell the story of the time capsule my dad put together in 1976, because we were getting ready to open it 50 years later.

That was really all I intended to do. I wasn’t trying to become a content creator or go viral. I just thought it was a great story and I wanted to tell it.

This story was supposed to be about a man who thought to capture life in 1976, seal it up and tell his children to open it in 50 years. And how that same man lost his memory to Alzheimer’s in the late 1990s, which made that time capsule even more valuable to his family.

The irony of that still gets me. A man captures memories, only to lose his own years later. It’s almost too much to take.

My dad was an engineer who spent much of his career working with batteries for the space program, including Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. He was a planner and a problem solver, so creating something in 1976 that was meant to last 50 years was actually pretty fitting for him.

In preparing to open the capsule, I thought I would share the story on Instagram. I wanted people to know what an amazing man my dad was and how excited we were to have something he created and left for us.

There was just one problem. I didn’t have much to work with.

I had one photo of the barrel that is the time capsule and a photo of the empty basement in our childhood home where it sat for decades. I don’t even have the barrel. One of my sisters does. In fact, I haven’t touched it during any of this.

I got a lukewarm start in April, posting those same photos from different content angles.

Then I decided to write a guidebook on how to create a time capsule. With America celebrating its 250th anniversary this year, I thought people might be interested in making one of their own and learning how to make it last years into the future. It’s more than just putting stuff in a box and storing it away.

We planned to open our capsule in June, so I innocently thought I would post about it for a couple of months, we would open it and that would pretty much be the end of the story.

But life happened and we had to postpone the opening until September. As it turns out, those extra three months changed everything.

One day I decided to post about “The Keeper,” a term I created for the book to describe the person responsible for the time capsule. The person who knows where it is and keeps it safe.

I posted it on Instagram which cross-posted to Facebook. And Facebook apparently decided the audience for it was people interested in crime dramas.

It probably didn’t help that our time capsule isn’t some beautiful wooden chest. It’s a 15-gallon industrial barrel with an old POISON return label on the side. My dad got it for free from work and it used to hold chemicals. (I’m sure he cleaned it out!)

Suddenly, the story was about a body in the barrel. I was reading comment after comment about who was in there, who put a body in it and whether my dad had killed someone.

This was definitely not the touching family story I had envisioned.

That reel went semi-viral with about 250,000 views. I quickly put up another one trying to counter it, and it also went semi-viral. The comments kept coming, and I had pretty much lost control of the account and the direction I wanted it to go.

The more I posted, which really wasn’t that much, the more annoyed and even angry people got. They accused me of wanting clicks. They accused me of making the whole thing up. And they wanted to know why I wouldn’t just open the stupid barrel.

I tried to explain that my family had an actual date when we could all be together to open something that had been waiting 50 years. But as we know, the same people don’t necessarily get the next reel fed to them.

So I tried again, this time with a reel about the irony of my dad creating this time capsule knowing he would not be around when we opened it. He was 52 in 1976.

That reel exploded. Overnight it got millions of views and I gained thousands of followers on Facebook. It seemed Dear Future had found a home on Facebook instead of Instagram.

But that also brought even more comments from people who were angry that we had not opened it yet.

I even got DMs telling me to f*** off.

Seriously? Who does that?

At some point I decided if people were going to keep making these comments, I might as well have some fun with them. So I kept going with reels that fed off the comments with humor.

Is there a body in there? People think it’s fake. Why would anyone wait 50 years? And finally, I announced the opening date.

Then another reel took off. I posted it almost three weeks ago and it is still going, approaching 6 million views. Somehow it also woke up the earlier viral reel, which is now approaching 7 million.

I now have more than 65,000 followers across Facebook and Instagram, and Dear Future has passed 15 million views on just 33 reels.

Fifteen million views from a little story I wanted to tell about my dad and an old barrel that is currently sitting under my sister’s house.

And here’s the strange part. Fifteen million views sounds like an incredible success, and in many ways it is. But the story I wanted to tell is not the story people heard.

The internet found a mystery in an old barrel. I was trying to tell a story about my dad.

About a man who thought about the future and captured a piece of our family’s life in 1976, then trusted his children to hang onto it for 50 years. And about the terrible irony of that same man eventually losing his own memories.

That was always the story I wanted to tell.

And after all of this, we still don’t know exactly what is inside that barrel. We know some things that are probably there, but we don’t know how they survived 50 years. What if things are damaged or even ruined? And after 15 million views, I can’t help but wonder what everyone else is expecting to find. What if what’s incredibly meaningful and exciting to us just isn’t that exciting to a bunch of strangers on the internet? That’s a strange thing to even have to think about.

We don’t know what we’ve forgotten about or what might surprise us. And I really have no idea how it is going to feel to finally see the things our dad put there for us so long ago.

But what gets me the most is knowing that he was the last person to hold all of those things. Fifty years later, his children will be the next.

On September 19, we finally get to find out.

After that, I honestly don’t know what happens to Dear Future.

I still want people to know my dad. And I still care about the reason I started all of this in the first place: capturing life, memories and the human experience of time.

Maybe I can steer Dear Future back there. Or maybe this was simply one incredible story that somehow reached 15 million people before it reached its ending.

I guess I’ll find out.

UPDATE September 16: When I wrote this, the Dear Future reels had reached about 15 million views across social media. A week later, that number has passed 27 million views, and more than 155,000 people are now following the story.