How to remember everything and feel nothing

the transition to the digital was not all that it was made out to be

From Wall-E

It takes two decades of storing everything in the cloud to realize that you don’t actually want infinite storage space. You accumulate hundreds of gigabytes of material – pictures, videos, journals, screenshots, downloads – little pieces of your life that you compiled and safeguarded as a way of remembering who you are. And you eventually realize that you compiled too much: it looks more like a garbage heap than a nicely curated gallery of memories. I have written millions of words in my journals in my past decade of journaling. If you look through my notes you’ll find a list of every task I completed for every single day since 2023. I’ve had stretches of months at a time where I journal thousands of words each day. And most of it means nothing to me.

There’s a trope in debates about life-extension: there are those who are obsessed with reversing aging and achieving immortality, and in opposition to them are those who say that the finiteness of life is what gives it meaning. I don’t think it’s finiteness that gives life meaning. I think it’s choices: the fact that you chose this path instead of that, the fact that you fell into this friend group instead of another, the fact that you chose to build a life with this person instead of someone else. What gives life meaning—to the extent that there is any one “source of meaning” in life—is its particularity: the fact that you have this particular history, this family, this collection of memories.

When you try to store everything, you reject the reality of choices. It’s easier to defer choices to some future version of yourself; take a picture of everything and you can filter through them later. Create a checklist for every task, document how you spend every hour of each day and save it in a spreadsheet in case it might be useful someday. It’s “optionality” taken to a psychotic extreme. Out of this compulsion is born products like Rewind, which promises to record everything you do on your computer and feed it all to an AI, so you can answer any question about what you’ve done, go back to any point in time. As they put it, it enables you to “remember everything.”

No one seems to question whether “remembering everything” is actually good for you. When you look at actual humans who could remember everything, you come to think of it more as a curse than a superpower. In his 1968 book The Mind of a Mnemonist, Alexander Luria documents one such case study. His patient, Solomon Shereshevski, or Patient S, could be read 70 words in a row and he’d immediately be able to recite them forward, backward, and in any other order. Luria struggled to come up with a single memory test that S would fail. And yet S’s superhuman ability to remember served as a major source of distress in his life. When recalling events, his mind would be overwhelmed with irrelevant details. His brain struggled with salience, to pick out the details of an event that actually mattered:

S was filled with highly detailed memories of his past experiences and was unable to generalize or to think at an abstract level. While the complex sensations evoked by stimuli helped him remember lists of numbers and words, they interfered with his ability to integrate and remember more complex things. He had trouble recognizing faces because each time a person’s expression changed, he would also “see” changing patterns of light and shade, which would confuse him. He also wasn’t very good at following a story read to him. Rather than ignoring the exact words and focusing on the important ideas, S was overwhelmed by an explosion of sensory experiences.

We all have a version of patient S inside of us. We can get overwhelmed with options, stuck in the details of a problem and unable to see the bigger picture. The tools we have – our cameras, our spreadsheets, our journals and databases – they can augment our minds, give us a degree of self-reflection and self-observation that would have been unthinkable in the past. But if we don’t use them carefully, they can distract us. They can hinder our judgement rather than augmenting it. I am a fan of all these tools; I like having more options, more memories stored, more information at my disposal. But I am not a fan of using technology to dissociate from the fact that nothing is truly permanent, that you can’t know everything. Forgetting is a crucial component of healthy memory; letting go, embracing not knowing, is a crucial component of being a healthy person.

A friend and I started a disappearing text chat the other day. This is something I’m generally opposed to because I like being able to read through old chats; I like being able to remember everything I’ve experienced. I once took my laptop in to the Apple store for a repair, and they unexpectedly had to wipe the entire device, and when I learned this I stormed out of the store because I had two folders in there that I never backed up. (Now I back up everything, on both iCloud and Dropbox.) And yet, I’ve found something oddly satisfying about the disappearing chat with my friend. We share a thought or a funny meme, maybe even something I’d enjoy looking back on, and a week later it’s gone. It feels like I’m carrying a little bit less, even though the whole promise of digital information storage was that it’s not supposed to weigh anything or take up any space.

None of this is to say that having more space is worse than having less. It’s good to have more space (and more options), but the more space you have, the more wisdom you need to make good use of that space. So by all means, take all the pictures you want, track your habits, journal every day, and document your to-do’s. But try to recognize sooner than later that you can’t actually hold onto everything. Even if we eventually reach the techno-optimist utopia of abundance, where we have effectively unbounded time, space, energy, and information, we will never have unbounded attention. We will always have to make choices about what to keep, and what to discard. Better to get comfortable with making that choice now, rather than having to let all of it go at once.

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Special thanks to Aadil and Connie for workshopping this with me.