[HN Gopher] Ten years of remembering every day that passes (2022)
___________________________________________________________________
Ten years of remembering every day that passes (2022)
Author : phreeza
Score : 221 points
Date : 2024-02-23 08:03 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (lembransation.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lembransation.blogspot.com)
| tetris11 wrote:
| Alzheimer's has to be one of the worst. I do find euthanasia to
| be a slippery slope[0], but I'll make an exception for
| Alzheimer's.
|
| 0: picture an understaffed and underfunded hospital, with a
| single nurse walking around calmingly asking anyone if they want
| it to end
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Making an exception for X is the same slippery slope. And easy
| talk for people who haven't had a family member die in agony or
| something like that in a place where they don't allow control
| over your own life. My life, my terms; if I want out, it needs
| to be an option.
|
| Which is exactly the problem with Alzheimer; cancer is much
| easier; you are usually lucid but not very happy the last few
| weeks/months, so let's end it. Alzheimer's they cannot even ask
| you, as you cannot decide for yourself for probably a long time
| already.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| I've had multiple family members die with Alzheimer's; can I
| sign up when young and lucid to die early if I get diagnosed?
|
| The sheer horror of forgetting your children and
| grandchildren sickens me -- and I have to say, those
| relatives were gone long before they were gone.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| > I've had multiple family members die with Alzheimer's;
| can I sign up when young and lucid to die early if I get
| diagnosed?
|
| In the Netherlands (and I guess other countries), you have
| to arrange this very early (if you know your family has
| Alzheimers, like mine). Once you have symptoms or even are
| diagnosed, you cannot decide anymore. And you'll end up in
| a home, knowing nothing and no-one and often drugged up,
| until you die of natural causes (although the last part you
| don't notice anyway; your family does).
| grodriguez100 wrote:
| Being diagnosed should not prevent you from making an
| advance directive as long as you are in full possession
| of your mental faculties. That's how it works in Spain at
| least. In certain cases this may involve a medical
| evaluation.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| We had some issues in the family with this, but yes, it
| _might_ be because the diagnoses was already (perceived
| to be) too late. I would recommend doing it young if it
| 's a familiar/genetic issue. If not, of course you cannot
| do that, so you try what you can.
| grodriguez100 wrote:
| In Spain this is possible. It is called "testamento vital"
| or "documento de voluntades anticipadas", and the goal is
| just that: to declare, in a legally binding way, your wish
| to receive or not receive certain kinds of medical
| treatments in the future, in case you can no longer decide
| when the time comes. This includes euthanasia in cases
| where it is legally allowed. Alzheimer is one of such
| cases.
| bloak wrote:
| I don't have a lot of experience with Alzheimer's, but in
| the couple of cases I've observed, though not from very
| close, the patient didn't seem to be suffering or unhappy
| at the end. There was a brief intermediate period of
| paranoia, in which they obviously were unhappy, but then
| they settled down into a state of complete doolallitude in
| which they were an expensive burden for professional carers
| but seemed quite cheerful. That makes the euthanasia
| question a bit harder.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| We afford old people in their last days less compassion than
| a dog. I look forward to the day when we look back at this as
| a moral outrage.
|
| Our family have recently been in the situation where my
| partners 85 year old grandfather, who sometimes struggles to
| remember who we are, had to have his leg amputated due to
| some metalwork he had implanted in his knee 10 years ago
| having worn through his skin due to him losing muscle and
| being very thin from being bed bound. He has approximately
| zero chance of adapting to having his leg amputated and, in
| all honesty, most of the family hoped he would die on the
| operating table as he has no meaningful quality of life.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| > We afford old people in their last days less compassion
| than a dog. I look forward to the day when we look back at
| this as a moral outrage.
|
| Maybe religious groups/political parties/lobbies etc; if
| they are against abortion, they will definitely be against
| ending grandma (who doesn't know who you or your grandpa
| are, but let's not mention that); religious people see it
| as suicide _and_ murder, so off to hell with 2+ people for
| every euthanasia.
| vkou wrote:
| Ironically, there's a large overlap between those people
| and people who support capital punishment.
| nippoo wrote:
| Is there? I'm genuinely curious where this stat comes
| from.
| vkou wrote:
| The Venn diagram of states that criminalize abortion and
| states that carry out the death penalty is nearly a
| circle... As are the sets of politicians, and the
| platforms that evangelical organizations tend to endorse.
|
| Catholics are an exception, but they are a relatively
| politically inactive minority in the US.
|
| https://reproductiverights.org/maps/abortion-laws-by-
| state/ [1]
|
| https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/states-landing
|
| [1] Florida's only yellow because it's still being fought
| in the courts.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I find that to be rational - if you believe in eternal
| damnation, you would want the bad people to get there
| fast, but keep the good people out. And if you feel this
| is really in *your* hands, you would push very vocally
| for it.
| Thiez wrote:
| When the destination is eternal, there is no rational
| reason to hurry there. What is a human lifetime compared
| to eternity? Even a trillion years is inconceivably short
| compared to eternity. If an afterlife exists the time
| where the inhabitants can still remember their life
| before death must be insignificant.
| em-bee wrote:
| that depends on the dimension of time in the afterlife.
| some believe that there is no time at all in the
| afterlife, such that all souls in the afterlife appear to
| have been there since the beginning, yet also seem to all
| just have entered just now.
|
| also, in as much as life on earth is a preparation for
| the afterlife, you will always be reminded of what you
| failed to do in your human life, just like you may get a
| frequent reminder of how not graduating from university,
| or worse being born into a certain demographic has
| limited your job/life options.
| johnp271 wrote:
| I don't see it as ironic at all. One way anthropologists
| studying a society can gauge what that society values is
| to look at the punishments applied for various
| transgressions. There are severe consequences for
| transgressions against things that a society values
| highly. Thus if a society values each human life as the
| most precious component of their society, then it is not
| unreasonable if that society places the most severe
| penalty on anyone who ends such a life. For that "most
| severe penalty" to be the ending of the life of the
| perpetrator, if such judgement is determined with grave
| concern for all parties involved including the
| perpetrator, is not ironic. It signals to the members of
| that society that their very life is the most precious
| aspect of the society of which they are a member.
| Thiez wrote:
| And yet we know that people get wrongfully convicted and
| executed somewhat regularly. If you truly value life
| highly, you must prefer life in prison over the death
| penalty. The risk of wrongful execution is unacceptable.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| If only they would leave the responsibility for hell and
| punishments to their omnipotent god. Especially if they
| didn't even read the Bible. But no, a supposed eternity
| of punishment isn't long and early enough for them.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > My life, my terms; if I want out, it needs to be an option.
|
| It's always an option, it's just kind of weird that it's
| illegal for trained medical professionals to help you do it
| certainly and painlessly.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| It's not that weird. Doctors and the state have perverse
| incentives. We also discourage suicide for good reasons.
| cogman10 wrote:
| States with the death penalty are finding it hard to find
| doctors and suppliers to carry out the punishment. I
| don't, frankly, think there's a lot of perverse
| incentive.
|
| For the medical field, the incentive is for longevity.
| Nursing homes make money on occupancy, they aren't going
| to want to kill off their primary source of income. The
| state might care, but they have an uphill battle if they
| tried pulling off soylent green.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| Killing people to take their organs would be one perverse
| incentive. Reducing costs to the state would be another.
|
| Canada has been taking the lead with euthanasia. They
| propose it as a solution for such things as depression
| and poverty, or anything else that would make life
| unbearable for you (regardless of whether it's
| reasonable). See:
|
| https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/another-case-of-a-
| sick-...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/11/canada-
| cases-r...
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/christi
| ne-...
|
| https://nypost.com/2023/02/24/canada-considers-expanding-
| eut...
|
| On the other hand, the medical establishment currently
| has incentives to keep people alive. That can certainly
| lead to perverse incentives too.
| ametrau wrote:
| Just one problem with the is that it becomes _in practice_ a
| go to option in healthcare for difficult cases as it
| introduces a moral hazard[1]. Like pure horror of maid abuse
| in Canada.
|
| [1] Kill this patient or let them be bad mark on the
| hospital's / care fac's report sheet?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Making an exception for X might just indicate an ignorance of Y
| and Z and others.
| syoc wrote:
| Or it might indicate an ignorance of X and a better
| understanding of Y and Z.
| passion__desire wrote:
| movie "The Father" [0] really drived home the point of how much
| memory is part of our identity. I highly recommend this movie.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TZb7YfK-JI
| BeetleB wrote:
| Actually a real case in a US state that has death with dignity
| laws. One requirement of the law is that you can make the
| decision only when in a very bad state (high pain, etc as
| certified by a doctor). And only the person can make the
| decision. Not a loved one.
|
| A woman diagnosed with Alzheimer's couldn't make use of this
| because it'll only get bad when she loses much of her mental
| faculty. But by that point she is not mentally fit to make that
| decision.
|
| She filed a lawsuit and eventually moved to Europe to get her
| death with dignity there.
| tmountain wrote:
| I just moved to a new country for the first time, and I've been
| doing a micro journal every day. Basically, I write 3-5 sentences
| capturing the most meaningful moments of the day. I've been doing
| this for two months now, and I've already found some benefits--
| both in gaining equilibrium and dialing up key details in
| sequence when necessary (i.e., when exactly did I start that home
| renovation project?). I'm lucky to be young enough that my
| cognition is still sound, but I can see benefits in this practice
| as I age.
| em-bee wrote:
| when i got my first portable laptop (a sony picturebook) i
| started a travel diary in a similar manner. initially only when
| i was away from home, but when i moved countries being away
| from home became a permanent state, so i kept writing almost
| every day. until it became a habit. i don't review past
| entries, but like you i sometimes use the diary to research
| certain facts.
|
| interestingly, when i write i always have some kind of audience
| in mind, my wife, other family members. some friends (the later
| being inspired by a friend who actually started a semi-public
| journal he shares with close friends, a circle that i feel
| privileged to have been invited to. however, i have not
| actually shared my own diary with anyone yet)
| nequo wrote:
| Other than it helping you as a source when you need to recall
| facts, have you noticed this habit changing you or how you
| experience going through your day?
| em-bee wrote:
| that is a very good question, my initial response was going
| to be no, but while trying to explain that answer i
| realized it's not quite true.
|
| it does not directly change my habits, but it does give me
| a better understanding of myself. for example one thing i
| learned is that it bothers me if i didn't accomplish at
| least something each day, to the point that i can't go to
| sleep. the reflection helps me notice smaller
| accomplishments, so i can sleep easier.
|
| part of the benefit is a form of general reflection on the
| day, even on things that i don't write down. it does help
| me with is noticing when i get stuck in a rut, where one
| day after another is the same. like if for the fifth day in
| a row i wrote: _get kids ready for school. work. make
| dinner. watch tv._ it helps me notice these kind of
| pattern, and also, see how long this was going on. then i
| can refocus and look what else interesting is happening
| that i may not have noticed before. so either it changes
| how i feel about each day or it helps me add activities
| that break the routine.
|
| it also helps me track things that i do want to change. say
| i set a goal of going for a walk for one hour each day,
| then this detail, which i ignore most of the time, now gets
| added to the diary. the diary doesn't so much cause me to
| change my habits, but rather is available as a tool that i
| can use to support an intended change of habits. but i
| don't do this systematically. it's more like an
| afterthought when other ways to reach the goal fail and i
| am bothered enough to do something about it.
|
| it also helps me realize when i get behind on work. when
| you are at home busy with kids, sometimes a week can pass
| by without me realizing it. the daily reflection can act as
| an intervention. and the diary helps me understand that i
| didn't waste the week doing nothing.
| Vivtek wrote:
| I've been doing this since 2016 and I'm frustrated on the
| regular that I never did it before. It's incredibly useful to
| know when things happened.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Yes, I do something similar for when I travel, work around my
| house and garden, natural events (e.g. first sightings of
| bats in the spring, first blossoms appear, a specific tree
| all bare of leaves in the autumn).
|
| It gives a good sense of what is changing over the years and
| what stays the same.
| dmd wrote:
| My wife and I have been keeping a daily journal since our first
| child was born in 2014 - about 100 - 200 words a day. (And
| before that i'd been doing it just for myself since 2006.)
| Besides just having it to go back to and read, something I'm
| really excited about is llm context windows getting large
| enough that I can feed the whole thing in (it's about 1.5
| million words) and ask questions. grep only goes so far.
| bombcar wrote:
| The best part will be the LLM hallucinations of things that
| never happened, and then it gaslighting you. ;)
| rolisz wrote:
| With RAG (so when you give it source text), hallucinations
| are greatly reduced (not completely, but greatly).
| passion__desire wrote:
| I think you will like this short story by Ted Chaing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_
| o...
| dghughes wrote:
| I've been keeping a food diary since Nov 2014. It started off
| as a reminder to myself to eat better and fewer calories. I
| don't want to break the chain I even recorded my meals during
| over a week of no power after hurricane Fiona.
|
| Here's my supper on day 1 if anyone is curious lol (note
| format is: day, month, year)
|
| Saturday 01/11/2014 Beans, Baked, molasses and pork
|
| Saturday 01/11/2014 Rice, Basmati, 1 cup
|
| Saturday 01/11/2014 Pop, Orange cream, 355ml
|
| Also my exercise inadvertently became a memory tool for me as
| well. Since being diagnosed with hypothyroid I noticed that
| my short-memory was not great. So this is a way to force
| myself to remember things I did today. Stuff I'd normally
| dismiss as unneeded info and clear it from my mind.
| LispSporks22 wrote:
| I did this for a few years. I started off listing component
| volumes and mass etc. Towards the end I was just noting
| "good" or "bad" (like how I thought I went) on a calendar,
| then not even consistently.
|
| I learned that this is how much of my approach to life
| works: Zeal followed by a gradual decline into
| indifference.
| dleink wrote:
| Do you retain after effects on behavior from the zeal
| phase?
| leobg wrote:
| You can already do that now. Run a sliding window over it,
| collecting anything relevant to your question. Then,
| summarize the summaries. (Or run vector search. But everybody
| does that, so it's boring. :))
| paganel wrote:
| I couldn't honestly do that, the nostalgia would be too much for
| me, even for only 10 years ago, even 5.
|
| And then how do you process past relationships and marriages? Or
| the death of loved ones? Or other such traumatic experiences?
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| Yeah. I remember vacations the most. And that is enough for me.
|
| Live your life one day at a time.
| em-bee wrote:
| i note them with a simple entry. or i describe the details of
| the wedding or funeral, and other relevant facts, but i don't
| write about my feelings.
|
| for one, i consider the diary as something others may read some
| day, i don't necessarily want share my feelings. but also, at
| least from my experience so far, reading about the facts of a
| traumatic experience helps me remember the feelings i had at
| the time. so rereading entries and recalling events is how i
| process these.
| paganel wrote:
| Honest props to you for managing to do that, you're a much
| stronger person than I am.
| em-bee wrote:
| thanks. but i am not sure if it counts, as i rarely go back
| to actually reread stuff. i am just writing what i have to
| deal with anyways, as it happens. i mean to say that if i
| do have the strength to deal with such events, being able
| to write about it in my diary is not necessarily an
| indication of that.
|
| it rather manifests in other ways.
|
| if i may say so, i sense a certain "i wish i had the
| strength to do that" in your comment. i am afraid that what
| comes across as strength is rather a weakness, a sort of
| inability to be affected by these events. it took me
| decades to understand where that comes from, and still has
| me wonder, why.
| zvmaz wrote:
| "I don't want to remember nothing, nothing, you understand?!"
| [1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLv6ycYcpGI
| firtoz wrote:
| There are certain philosophical approaches to this problem.
| Quite a few of them start with: Why do you think that
| revisiting such things would distress you?
|
| How do you process them when you remember them occasionally
| without specific prompting?
| Vivtek wrote:
| That's real. There are whole years of my email archives I have
| troubles looking into.
| passion__desire wrote:
| Time heals (i.e. dampens) not just extreme sadness but also
| irrational exuberance.
| horsellama wrote:
| It's not clear to me how such a thing can be achieved. They talk
| about a "memory calendar" and "tags".
|
| Is it like, every day, stop for a minute and "commit" a single
| word to that day? Then revise the previous ones hoping that they
| stuck in memory?
| notclive wrote:
| I was curious too and found
| http://lembransation.blogspot.com/2016/02/starting-out.html,
| the tags appear to be a couple of short sentences.
| throwuwu wrote:
| He uses a few sentences to describe them but he says that he
| sees them as pictures on a calendar which he navigates as
| though he is standing on it, which is a key aspect because he
| is making use of the method of loci[0]. He then uses those
| images to start remembering the event pictured in them along
| with all the other sensations.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
| FranklinMaillot wrote:
| I use an app called Daylio to do something like that. It's a
| mood and habit tracker with journaling.
|
| I set up a reminder everyday to record my mood, select the
| activities I'm tracking and write a few words. It takes less
| than a minute.
|
| It gives me weekly, monthly and yearly reports that are fun to
| see and sometimes insightful as it shows correlations between
| activities and mood levels.
|
| It also randomly shows me journal entries from 6 months, one
| year and 2 years ago. It's a reminder to reflect on where I was
| in my life and what I've achieve, or not achieved in that time.
|
| https://www.daylio.net/
| cpp_frog wrote:
| _The moments captured in my images are fresh, but my perspective
| on them changes._
|
| I am doing an experiment in memory and trying to memorize the
| name of every U.S. county, with the aid of a map. Several months
| in I can say that the brain inexorably will tie names together
| (wether by geographical proximity or etymology, e.g. Imperial-
| Riverside-San Diego or Redwood-Greenwood), and the addition of
| new names affects the perception of the ones before, or the
| perception of words which happen to be county names. I could
| write an entire essay on the limits of memory, but it would
| hardly be better than Jorge Luis Borges's story _Funes, the
| memorius_.
|
| For anyone curious I can name 80% of U.S. counties with the aid
| of a blank map, and my geographic intuition has improved greatly.
| Every county (and county name) has a history attached to it, and
| sometimes when someone tells me where they grew up, I can guess
| their ancestry more or less, especially if they come from rural
| areas. It surprises them, sometimes even more when they know I'm
| not american.
| RobRivera wrote:
| Memory seems to be cemented when theres some type of value
| assigned to it, like a useful memory peg I find.
|
| A major battle, a geomarker, usually there is SOMETHING
| noteworthy historical. I may not have put the labor into the
| volume of counties as you, but I've lived in so many places,
| and I index local histories of everywhere I live, and it
| cements so much.
|
| Love the effort you put into testing your cognitive faculties!
| gravity2060 wrote:
| This is fascinating. I'm working on a memory project and would
| really like to get in touch and hear your insights on limits
| and especially counters to interference with memorization. I'll
| put my email in my profile; pure gratitude if you can spare
| some time to share your wisdom with me.
| lobochrome wrote:
| It's so hard to keep this going, but I'm keeping my paper
| calendars, which I use for important meetings, weekly to do lists
| and my training plans.
|
| Whenever I think of trashing the old ones I open them up and am
| so immediately fascinated by that glimpse into my past life.
|
| It's not useful in a self-improvement sense but highly
| entertaining, for lack of a better word.
|
| I guess in general it might make me more self reflective, but
| then that never had been a weak point for me.
| em-bee wrote:
| yeah, i can never bear to throw away these things either. i
| don't use calendars often, but when i do, i want to keep the
| notes. however moving around makes it very hard to carry this
| stuff along. so when i get a chance, i leave stuff at my
| mothers place. and i make photos of noteworthy pages. same when
| i used whiteboards to track my work (before i learned about
| kanban)
| bumbledraven wrote:
| > With approaching 4000 images, I need to get through 3 months
| per day. That rarely happens as my discipline has waned and I've
| let things slide when I've struggled to remember tags.
|
| Spaced repetition might be able to help here.
|
| Spaced repetition promises to help us remember an ever-increasing
| number of things even while spending an essentially fixed amount
| of time each day reviewing those things. The amount of time spent
| reviewing is said to depend almost entirely on the learning rate,
| not on the number of things remembered.
|
| https://supermemo.guru/wiki/History_of_spaced_repetition_(pr... :
|
| > In a long-term process, for the forgetting index equal to 10%,
| and for a fixed daily working time, the average time spent on
| memorizing new items is only 5% of the total time spent on
| repetitions. This value is almost independent of the size of the
| learning material.
| phreeza wrote:
| I actually found this article when searching for things related
| to spaced repetition. But I am wondering how well it would work
| due to the sequential nature of the stuff being remembered. I
| think it's probably easier to navigate from one day to the next
| with the method of loci or similar, than it is to recall a
| single day just from its date.
| medstrom wrote:
| Yes, you wouldn't use a date. A more likely structure would
| be:
|
| - the front of a flashcard shows a photo from 20 June and the
| back shows a photo from 21 June
|
| - the front of another flashcard shows that same 21 June
| photo and the back shows a photo from 22 June
|
| - and so on!
|
| If you have multiple photos per day... maybe you could create
| a mosaic for each day? Bonus if the mosaic randomizes the
| order of items on every showing, but not necessary.
|
| This seems definitely automatable!
| phreeza wrote:
| Nice idea, though I guess then in order to actually recall
| a specific day you'd have to traverse through the entire
| series? Kind of like a linked list vs an array. Maybe some
| hybrid approach could work with some "anchor" days that you
| can get to directly and then traverse from there.
| medstrom wrote:
| You'd think so, but that shouldn't be necessary with
| spaced repetition. It's the same how you'd memorize a
| verse such as the following:
|
| > Roll forth, my song, like the rushing river,
|
| > That sweeps along to the mighty sea;
|
| > God will inspire me while I deliver
|
| > My soul of thee!
|
| > Tell thou the world, when my bones lie whitening
|
| > Amid the last homes of youth and eld,
|
| > That once there was one whose veins ran lightning
|
| > No eye beheld.
|
| There are 8 lines in this verse, so you make 7
| flashcards. One flashcard just teaches you how to
| remember the second line, having heard the first line.
| Another flashcard just teaches you how to remember the
| third line, having heard the second line. Et cetera.
|
| Then someone comes along and quotes the first line to
| you, and you can immediately reproduce the rest.
| martinthenext wrote:
| In 2016 I created a telegram bot to make it super easy for me to
| keep daily diary, and I still use it now:
|
| https://t.me/DaytobaseBot
|
| Similar to other folks in the thread, I sometimes go back to old
| entries and reflect on how my life has changed. I find that my
| memory constantly simplifies and idealizes the past, and getting
| to see how it really felt day to day is very helpful.
| hoherd wrote:
| Do you happen to have the source code publicly available?
| bambax wrote:
| In October 2019 I made a bit that emails me every day and
| stores the replies in an SQLite database.
|
| I narrate each day the following morning, and aslo store random
| pieces of information (story of a debugging session, opinions
| on books I read or movies I watch, etc.)
|
| I have missed almost zero days since the beginning. One of the
| most useful feature of this system is to store things people
| that I meet rarely, tell me. When I meet them again, years
| later, I can pick up the conversation where it was. Other than
| that, I rarely go back to read old entries.
|
| I sometimes wonder what use AI could make of this.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| I've been doing the same for the past 5 years. Here's how I do it
| and what I've learned:
| https://untested.sonnet.io/Stream+of+Consciousness+Morning+N...
|
| > Yet, I can see no advantage. The great benefit of this process,
| even as I struggle with it, is it gives me a rounded view of my
| life.
|
| Absolutely, 10000%. Spotting patterns (on a micro and macro
| scale, "outside" and "inside") is one of the most useful skills
| I'm getting out of this. I have 1-2 years of journals from the
| time I was 9-11 years old buried somewhere in a basement 3000km
| from where I live at the moment. I'm curious to see what I can
| learn from them after not having seen them for almost 25 years.
| rietta wrote:
| So like keeping a Dougie Howzer-style journal on the computer?
| Unfrozen0688 wrote:
| ooh wow I just let my days pass
| bradley13 wrote:
| I'm not sure. Maybe it's because I have a poor memory to begin
| with, but I just don't see the reason for this. It reminds me of
| older people (mind, I'm over 60 myself) who spend all their time
| reminiscing.
|
| Isn't it better to look forward rather than back? Approaching
| retirement, my pressing question is: what do I want to do _next_?
| newman8r wrote:
| > Isn't it better to look forward rather than back?
|
| After looking into some basic Zen philosophy, I think it also
| makes sense to consider focusing on spending more time in the
| present. The past and the future being ideas compared to the
| reality of the present - it's like watching a movie compared to
| real life. If the plight of the old is to reminisce, perhaps
| the plight of the young is to daydream. Both are important
| parts of life, but taking time to appreciate the present is
| easy to leave out.
| thread_id wrote:
| I also am over 60 and my philosophy regarding this topic is
| similar. Life is a series of moments that happen and are over
| never to be revisted again (unless you make this effort - and
| good for those who do and get value in their lives for having
| done so). My memory of the past is also limited - I remember
| random people and events going back to early childhood for
| reasons I don't fully understand, but mostly I have forgotten
| all the eras of my life and I don't really dwell on it. I have
| no concept of time and it has always been that way and age has
| had zero impact here. I get it "The unexamined life..." etc. So
| I invest energy in introspection and self discovery in service
| of continuous improvment. Whether I am satisfied with the life
| I have lived or not makes no difference - I cannot go back and
| change it. However, no longer do I have the luxury of time. By
| comparison to the journey I have already completed, I have very
| few moments remaining. And one day.... So I gratfully focus on
| this moment and all the precious few moments I am graced with.
| kredd wrote:
| I'm on the younger side, but my parents are in their 70s, and I
| recall them saying something along the lines of "what is life,
| if not a collection of memories", and it kinda stuck with me.
| Most likely it's just some quote they've read in the past, and
| were just reiterating it, but still.
|
| I generally agree with you. There might not be a good reason to
| look back into the past constantly, but the author ends the
| post with a personal note about how their mom is going through
| Alzheimer's. And I can somewhat relate to that, as my grandma
| used to live with us in the last 10 years of her life, and it
| was devastating to watch how feeble her memories were getting
| every day. At some point, when you're just sitting at a dinner
| table on a Thursday night with people whom you've known for
| ages, recollecting some memories from the past is just... nice.
| There really isn't a good reason, or benefit for the future and
| what not; it just feels good. Thus I can see why someone would
| want to cherish those times, trying their best to not forget
| them.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| This is basically my dad. He almost routinely asks me about
| things that happened 10 or 15 years ago.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I'm also 60 and probably retired - maybe I'll find some work
| again when the tech job market recovers - and I'm spending a
| lot of time trying to figure out what to do next.
|
| The author of the piece says: "The great benefit of this
| process, even as I struggle with it, is it gives me a rounded
| view of my life."
|
| While I can understand that spending _some_ time reviewing the
| past can have value, what this person is doing seems excessive
| and I 'm not sure I'd call it 'rounded'. I think in my case
| thinking about the past can reveal how things have or haven't
| changed in fundamental ways. For example, I was reminded
| yesterday of a local startup in my area that was working on a
| neural network accelerator chip in the early 90s and reflected
| on how many companies are now trying to do the same. There's
| nothing new under the sun as a wise man once said - what has
| been will be again. This kind of reminiscing gives perspective.
| noduerme wrote:
| This strikes me as possibly the most profound form of navel-
| gazing ever developed, wherein the navel becomes a black hole.
|
| If you spend each day remembering all previous days, eventually
| you'll just be remembering days you spent remembering other days.
| (Which is what the author is doing: Remembering remembering).
|
| Seems rather maddening. Why not learn a language or something?
| phreeza wrote:
| In fact the research on memorization shows that only a constant
| amount of time is needed to retain a given fact indefinitely,
| because the interval between reinforcements can rise
| exponential. So you can commit a fixed amount of time per day
| to this practice and retain everything, it does not necessary
| need to fill up your entire day. Though you are right it seems
| the author is using a different approach and is struggling with
| the accretion to some degree.
| svat wrote:
| Reminds me of a Borges story
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funes_the_Memorious, https://vig
| eland.caltech.edu/ist4/lectures/funes%20borges.pd...) and the
| article also led me to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia -- "Price has
| stated that she, like Funes, views her memory as a curse".
| ac2u wrote:
| Perhaps given the author's familial experiences with the
| tragedy of Alzheimers, it's a sort of therapy.
|
| I'm not saying it's effective, but perhaps doing such an
| exercise and having it lead to the circular "remembering
| nothing but remembering", it might help folks empathise with
| the fallibility of the mind when others suffer a disease like
| Alzheimers.
|
| Or maybe the author is just a curious sort. Either way, not my
| place to judge.
| null3cksor wrote:
| I have been using the 1 second a day app from 2016. Today will be
| the 8th year of my journey, and it feels very nice to look back
| at the compiled videos. I don't remember life in 214/15 because
| of much stress, but 16 onwards is a colorful memory.
|
| Shout out to the 1se app! Its been great.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Very interesting. Might help very much with "where did the time
| go?". I'll try to give it a shot, remembering every week.
| throwaway122263 wrote:
| Years ago I had a really bad breakup. We lived together for about
| 6 months and she slowly got more and more hostile towards me. She
| moved out and severed all contact with me. She forgot a couple of
| her daily journals in a drawer. Well, I had to look because I was
| so confused as to what happened.
|
| Reading through it, I was blown away at how skewed her perception
| of reality was. The way she recalled events were absolute
| fantasy. She took all these mundane interactions (a lot of which
| were genuinely positive) between us and twisted them into somehow
| being wronged by me.
|
| I had always thought of writing in a journal but after reading
| that decided I never would. It has the potential to crystalize
| misremembered, or misinterpreted things into reality. She had
| created a self propelling feedback loop of negativity.
| techno_tsar wrote:
| Her actions have more to do with her psychology and less to do
| with her keeping a journal. A lot of people keep journals and
| it probably has the opposite effect. She sounds emotionally
| immature.
| l33tman wrote:
| The Narrative Clip was created partially for this (giving people
| a photographic memory of sorts), and it was used by a lot of
| people with alzheimers as it turned out you can remember stuff
| better if you review every day's memories in the evening, or
| something like that.
| aubanel wrote:
| > My New Year's Resolution in 2019 was to learn the piano. Key to
| success is building mental representations of music and the
| keyboard. Increasingly, I do this by playing pieces on my mental
| piano
|
| As a correct pianist (lots of classical study, and sometimes I am
| paid to play in bars), this seems very weird to me. I don't see
| how doing this could be any useful for learning, it seems like a
| waste of effort.
| Andrex wrote:
| I would say 90% of the struggle of my learning to play piano
| was developing the correct muscle memory for the right motions
| for the right measures of the right song.
|
| The academic "Can I read and understand this sheet music?" is
| maybe 10%.
|
| It's possible if you put in the decades required to build up
| all the muscle memory needed for any song you might need to
| play (or you are a virtuoso), in which case reading and
| understanding the sheet music may be 90+% of your "practice
| time"... but the most accomplished pianists I know of still
| have to practice (with their hands) consistently.
| Hunpeter wrote:
| I think mental practice (e.g. visualizing yourself playing in
| the place you will perform next day, going through the sheet
| music consciously noting your intent and possible difficulties,
| or memorizing complex passages without the keyboard etc.) is a
| great complement to actual physical practice. It's no
| substitute, but at least it can be done basically anywhere.
| snitzr wrote:
| I take snapshots on film for fun and sometimes don't develop the
| film for a few months. When I finally see the photos I've taken,
| I might have forgotten most of the detail from that time. I see
| the photo and it jogs my memory. But I'm never sure if my memory
| is a hallucination extrapolated from the photo or if I'm using
| the photo to recall something that I just needed help to
| remember. It's like that experiment that showed people a faked
| picture of themselves in a hot air balloon. Many of the people
| shown this false photo would respond by creating false memories.
| My photos are really me but I wonder how accurate is any
| recollection beyond the photo.
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