Hi there, just commenting to say that I have been struggling with this the past few years and I have never seen someone describe how I felt so accurately. I'm about 30 but I remember starting to feel this way around the time I was in college, part of me is scared I damaged myself with binge drinking / pseudo-alcoholism in my early 20s. But I was always a cram-for-tests-then-forget-literally-all-of-it person in highschool and college, so maybe not.

I've been wondering if I am too 'in the moment' and don't do enough self-examination of the past. It seems some people get stuck replaying conversations or events over and over and thinking about them, whereas I do that almost not at all. I wonder if that rumination / self-examination is a core part of the memory forming process. I also wonder if aphantasia is related as I lean towards the non-visual end of the spectrum, or sort of a quiet / subdued inner monologue as I am the type that prefers to speak aloud to myself to think things through rather than silently ponder, not to say that I can't think silently. I also wonder if there's some need for idle time in the brain, and if our constant stimulation via content in the form of news, reddit, youtube, podcasts, etc. is deleterious to memory formation because my brain doesn't get any boredom or downtime. Perhaps that downtime is necessary for memory formation. I also wonder if my daily coffee habit might worsen it, or my once or twice a week moderate alcohol intake. Those are two things I should probably give up but it's really hard. I've also considered getting rid of my smartphone or going to a dumbphone to see if my brain uses the periods of boredom to do something useful and my memory improves. But that's such a hard decision to pull the trigger on as a digital addict.

Have you made any efforts to combat this by doing introspection or making daily attempts to recall or remember or store information? I haven't actually taken any steps to address this condition but it's been feeling more urgent and deserving of intervention. Have been considering a daily journaling habit to see if writing down biographical events will help cement them in my memory (and to have the artifact to go back and get info from). I also wonder if memory is a muscle and when one doesn't exercise 'remembering' their autobiographical information if that muscle weakens, and then perhaps the memory-write step also decays as well due to disuse/lack of need.

For the most debilitating part of this is having to relearn something that a coworker told me or explained a week or a month or six months ago, which I find embarrassing or insulting to them, and then the other thing is not being able to remember who I told what information to or I'll remember a personal detail or story someone told me on a date but then not be sure what individual told me the detail or story. Like 'is this the girl who told me her father died when she was young or was that my friend or another person I went on a date with last week'. It makes me feel like they will think I don't care about them when I can't remember important things they shared like being abused or something about their family. I've started taking notes on new people I meet and adding hobbies we have in common, things I like about them, etc.

edit: one other thing I thought of, it may be worth getting a sleep study done. could be a deficit of some part of the sleep cycle.

And another thing is, I wonder if this is hereditary as I remember as a child my father would forget what foods I liked and disliked and I'd have to always remind him and I felt so confused and like he had no memory, and my grandma would behave similarly. There'd be moments where I felt like they were really stupid, but now I look back and feel like maybe they had the same experience I do. Or there'd be situations that I look at now and think 'he couldn't remember whether something was true about me or true about my brother, but he remembered that one of us did / said / had that property'.