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> there's no way of going back now and recording it all, or interview all those people I had an opportunity to interview then but didn't.

If you still have copies of your old email inboxes, there are good tools to find your most interesting conversations with any given person or on any given topic. E.g. Stanford has a tool called ePADD: https://library.stanford.edu/projects/epadd

And then those emails can be donated to a university or museum with relevant collections, and/or published on the web. (Our startup, FWD:Everyone, does the latter.)

I find it rather vain of folks to think humanity should care forever about their personal experiences

That it won’t happen again or be known is part of the intrigue to me.

Why do we need to keep propagating our own contemporary fascinations forward in time?

We’re each going to die and very few of us will leave behind truly novel ideas that humanity can rely on

Most of our experiences are emotionally novel for us, and that specific time and place creates that novelty.

What makes them so will be completely lost on future people. So much information is inaccessible to them when reading about it or watching a poorly shot video

And to me that’s the cool part about having been there.

I’d rather folks go on creating such experiences for themselves than watch my highlight reel and never really get since they weren’t there

"I’d rather folks go on creating such experiences for themselves than watch my highlight reel and never really get since they weren’t there"

Don't worry, 99.9% of people are consumers and do exactly what you desire: nothing. We'll never know much about their lives.

Every person I ever met had some interesting story to tell or some interesting point of view worth noticing. Life is not just about doing the big & important things. Don't underestimate the ordinary people, each of them knows many things that you don't and has seen and experienced many things that you never will.

Couldn’t agree more! I think so much about this. What on earth gives anyone the impression anyone will care about us or our minutia in the future?

The fact is of the billions of humans on earth, almost all of them are either too low on resources or interest to even care about how things like the solar system or genetics operate, mysterie that humans have wondered for millennia and are only being unlocked now. It’s made me think that for most humans it’s enough to kind of wonder and enjoy the mysteries.

As a child I grew up upper middle class with kids who had time and resources to find out all kinds of things but most people including me just wasted most of our time, taking more interest in basic human interactions and intrigues than knowledge. It’s how humans are I think.

What makes anyone think some distant ancestor or researcher will care about us? I find it unlikely and kind of transparently desperate to think so. It’s liberating to know no one will care and I can die and have the freedom to just fade into oblivion and that no one but some AI will taken interest in my Gmails.

I saw a conversation where a diarist asked what a historian wished to find in someone's diary—like, do they wish for nuanced analyses about current events? But the historian said the most interesting stuff is that which you don't see in official chronicles or books: daily little things, relationships, habits, food, all the minutiae that still paints a picture of the world from a specific point of view.

For certain types of creator, diving into old archives is just the perfect way to get some inspiration or source material. It's true, archiving transcripts of your family's dinner conversations for 10 years isn't really going to do any future movie-maker any good, but the SubGenius folks went far beyond the mundane.

Plus, even if it were purely mundane, it would still be of eventual interest to historians, who could data mine over it for cultural references and such.

I'm not entirely sure what the line is between keep or save, but it could almost assuredly be drawn way to the left of where it is now and save a lot more for future generations.

> Couldn’t agree more! I think so much about this. What on earth gives anyone the impression anyone will care about us or our minutia in the future?

> What makes anyone think some distant ancestor or researcher will care about us? I find it unlikely and kind of transparently desperate to think so.

You say this but modern historians are desperate for these kind of sources even back a few hundred years since they provide an understanding of how the vast majority of humanity lived unlike the few royals (for example) whose lives were well documented.

It's unlikely historians of the future will lack sources in the way we do today but you never know what people will wonder about our times because we didn't think anyone would care.

> I’d rather folks go on creating such experiences for themselves than watch my highlight reel and never really get since they weren’t there

We learn as much from the paths others have walked as we do from walking it ourselves.

> I know you're out there and you know something we don't. Record it. Share it. Teach us. Interview the people who are involved in it. You might not get another chance.

I don't do this on purpose.

Some things should only exist in a time and a place for those who were actually there. It should fade with them and disappear into the writhing mass that is history.

Stop being cultural vampires: create your own experiences instead of trying to live off ours.

Ed:

The above is probably more snarky than necessary, but in a real sense, the constant reinvention of culture due to its ephemeral nature is what keeps us memetically vibrant. The calcification of culture through constantly reinterpreting high fidelity images isn't good for us developmentally.