Memory and Memorable
Looking at how many photos I have accumulated in my phone beggars belief.
And begs a question - why do we take so many pictures?
What is this obsession with documenting every day in our lives?
Because not every meal, relation, friend-date, occasion is memorable.
Most fall on a Forgetfulness curve, from immediate to somewhere in the blur of the next few years.
The “memorable” tag is reserved for a select few and try as we might, we do not have any control over what gets tagged with it.
So, why “pictures or it didn’t happen?”
As cave people, we drew figures to hopefully communicate and describe what we saw.
As media and retention and reproduction got better, we documented better and more aesthetically.
Our brains today are not very different from what they were 300000 years ago.
But our understanding and wisdom should be much better than the Flintstones.
So why do we obsess over cataloging of things so mundane and quotidian?
Do we fear drowning from the information overload?
Has our need for organization reached a psychosis of some kind?
Do we fear not being able to remember things with immediacy - the kind that amazed us as kids before the internet? Something we were told was a virtue?
Do we want to drown out the noise of our own thoughts that are so insipid, thus escaping its capacity to depress us?
Do we think that this material evidence makes us feel less insignificant in the grand scheme of things?
Do we think it creates a legacy lasting and more pertinently, worthy of futures consideration and judgement?
Does it reduce our fear of our impending death?
If anything has to be done, the time is now.
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