modern amnesia

scrolling my camera roll to remember what i did last weekend

I can’t shake the feeling that I’m starting to lose my mind. Or more specifically my memory. It started off innocuously — a forgotten birthday, an extra beat or two to recall what I did last weekend, a coffee shop I used to frequent thats name escapes me. But lately it feels like every day I’m forgetting something new.

I try to remember the name of the art gallery in new york, but I can’t get past this mental block. No big deal, I’ll just google that young painters name that famously dated the founder. For a full minute I find myself sitting at my desk, fingers poised above the keys, picturing her cherubic art in my mind but drawing a blank on her name.

anna weyant, summertime

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On a long phone call with my dear friend Ian, I confide in him my fears. I don’t think it’s just you, he says. Just the other day he blanked an old friends name — something that was once a reflexive endearment eroded without the muscle memory.

my google history

I find a Reddit thread from five years ago posing the question: does anyone else has trouble remembering things even though they’re young and healthy?

The top comment is written by someone presumably older who speculates that there’s a generational gap:

“younger people are often disengaged from the world around them compared to the past. They are only lightly present and inattentive to a far greater extent than people who lived in far less stimulating environments in the past”.

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Living in new york requires a certain self-preservation. I advert my eyes on the commute to work, walk around chinatown with headphones plugged into nothing, hurry past street signs without a glance. There’s so much to take in at all times that it feels like I take in nothing at all.

Every time I come back from traveling, I realize how little I pay attention. Last week I noticed a laundromat on the block I pass every day. It frightens me that I live so much in my head than presently in my body.

edward hopper, drug store (1927)

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Perhaps I’m overreacting. But I fear that our minds are slowly atrophying — starting with our attentions, our memories, our ability to reason. It feels dystopian that I am so reliant on my camera roll as a source of truth for what I did last weekend. Of course, it comes back to the phones.

Last year I realized how much of my day-to-day navigation is predicated on opening Google maps. I’ve started to try to memorize the directions to a new place rather than mindlessly following turn by turn directions.

The exercise reminds me how uncomfortable I am with uncertainty — oftentimes I’ll rush to open my Google maps, anxious I’ve missed the destination only to realize I’ve stopped a door or two too early. I crave the certainty of knowing that I will arrive at my destination in exactly 12 minutes, lest I waste a single second.

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I wonder if part of my forgetfulness is self-inflicted — in an effort to lower my screen time, I’ve started to journal every time I feel the urge to pick up my phone. 1:27pm post lunch and I just want to scroll and not do anything hard. 4:14pm I’m losing my mind — I have so many things to do.

The common thread is that I pick up my phone to avoid discomfort in my real life. If I just scroll long enough, my mind will be so pre-occupied by an overload of stimulation and data that I will forget what I was so stressed about in the first place.

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Or maybe there’s another way. Michael tells me that before he falls asleep he tries to recount the day chronologically. I try it a few nights in a row but fall asleep every time before I get to lunchtime. Last weekend, I picked up a japanese planner with a page for every day of the year — some days I fill the page, and other days I get only a few sentences down.

Another new years resolution: to only read classic literature. Or to read more of it — I’ve noticed that the 21st century bestsellers I’ve consumed seem to never stick, but I can recall The Heart of Darkness I read in 11th grade.

It’s January 16 so I’m uncertain if all of this will add up to anything. Maybe another year will pass my memory will remain elusive and fickle.

Currently, I am 300 pages into East of Eden. I bring my paperback everywhere, but reading it demands a kind of focused effort and intention that I’m not quite used to. Then again, I’m starting to believe that encountering a level of resistance is necessary to be changed by something. ✦✦✦

alexander mcqueen, no. 13 finale