Memories of unethical actions become obfuscated over time | Hacker News Reader

Memories of unethical actions become obfuscated over time

pnas.org

82 pointsprashnts9 comments

Anecdotally, I'd say that I've experienced this because those memories carry lots of guilt. Over time, you lose the guilt because you keep trying to forget the details.

personal self-observation - we want to be happy with ourselves, or at least in content state, feeling our actions are well justified and have good reasons. but some people live truly bad lives, hurting people left and right, doing all kinds of undeserved negative things to others. so there is some background process in sub-consciousness that goes over memories, highlights positive intense parts, and lights up the negative ones.

which is crap. I don't want to iron my memories, I want them to be exactly same as they were when experiencing them. I don't need to remember shitty girlfriends as actually nice ones, miserable travels as actually nice ones etc.

so I am always trying to counter it consciously - nice memories are OK, but the less positive ones I try to specifically remember the full mix of emotions associated with them. not 100%, but works quite well. since people generally don't change much (at least don't improve), this also helps to set expectations when communicating with some (ie family black sheeps).

Mine are as vivid as ever.

Same here. I read somewhere that there might be a link between depression and strength of memory, which makes a lot of sense to me.

Perhaps a healthy person is supposed to forget the past. I don't, and memories of guilt and shame inform and restrict many of my decisions, and they do so more and more as I get older.

The thing is, I know that I have lived a relatively good life so far, even compared to most of my friends. Exes of mine have remarked that I was their best boyfriend, and that the messy breakups that I feel guilt over were nothing really that bad. But from my perspective, they were. I've apologized profusely about certain events to friends of mine, and they had to explain that it wasn't that bad and friends sometimes hurt each other. But the memories and accompanying feelings don't really fade, and I randomly get flashbacks, even to minor things that happened many years.

Reminding myself that everyone is flawed, reminding myself that these memories of 'bad' things I did to another already faded in the memory of the person I hurt, and probably didn't hurt them as much as I think it did, reminding myself that the best thing is to move on and try to do better, all of that calms me down a bit.

But the next step, allowing myself to get into situations where I might cause pain again, that's a tough one. It's much easier to play it safe. I't something I'm working on, but I wish I could just forget more easily, the way many people around me can (or pretend to, or at least don't let it get in the way of living).

I'm reminded of this quote (again):

> "We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time.

> When we hesitate in being direct, we unknowingly slip something on, some added layer of protection that keeps us from feeling the world, and often that thin covering is the beginning of a loneliness which, if not put down, diminishes our chances of joy.

> It’s like wearing gloves every time we touch something, and then, forgetting we chose to put them on, we complain that nothing feels quite real. Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world but to unglove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold and the car handle feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being, soft and unrepeatable."

Wow...this really spoke to me. Thank you for writing it. At the risk of being overly cheesy, I want to reply to your quotes with one of my favorites from Kurt Vonnegut:

“Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.”

There is an entire field of therapy called CBT or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. It's philosophy is around unlearning 'mind traps' and help individuals see their life in an unbiased realistic manner.

Indeed, I'm a big fan of it (and meditation/mindfulness as a broader 'field'). In fact, I'm about to start what I am almost certain is a CBT program with a therapist, to deal with these kinds of things. I have high hopes.

If they are as vivid as ever despite the obfuscation, well, it must have been something :-/ (joke)

More seriously: we're all different. That's for sure. The general tendency nevertheless tells a lot about ourselves.

I believe the "unethical amnesia" to be somewhat overblown. Those who have a habit of lying, will just continue to do so, regardless if it's something they did 5 seconds ago or 5 years ago. The truth is intact except they will even lie to themselves, not just other people. Also I believe a lot of what makes people do and say what they do, is strictly speaking, not quantifiable on a physical level alone. It is like trying do differentiate the daily food intake between identical twins. Doesn't matter. In this case, truth is a universal constant whereas lies only exist in the physical plane.

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