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Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

In my experience this plays out on multiple timescales. When you get older you start to have entire decades of life boiled down to the factual knowledge you gained plus a handful of episodic memories.

It's a good reminder to write shit down and take lots of mundane pictures. You don't realize until it's too late though.

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A friend of mine from some time back chatted about this once. His take was that as you get older, your "mental models" grow and are able to cover larger parts of your day/week/month and your mind simply keeps the important parts but lets the rest fade.

When you're younger, those models are less complete and larger parts of your waking moments are needed to build the foundations of these models, so you feel like time is slower since so much more of your time is kept "fresh".

I'm probably butchering his take on it, but I blame my own mental models for compressing away the finer details!

> When you're younger, those models are less complete and larger parts of your waking moments are needed to build the foundations of these models, so you feel like time is slower since so much more of your time is kept "fresh".

As a corollary, if you want to keep on feeling young and feeling time pass slowly, you need to keep on incorporating "new" experiences into your life that extend (or change) your mental models.

Good reminder to backup your smartphone photos so you don’t lose them to a brickening or lockout.

Actually this generation will have a very different relationship with the past. Never before there was so many high resolution traces of your daily life.

Indeed. We take photos and videos for our son pretty much everyday. He would need a good chunk of his life to review all these if he wants when he grows up and moves to his own house.

> moves to his own house.

i'm sorry we don't have the technology for that yet

There was a great article on this recently. The author made the point that if there was a day, week, or month where there were no backups or photos then you might put less value on that time of your life in retrospect. Conversely there might be a timespan where you took too many photos and might feel like there was more value to be had in that time.

Interesting. I forgot who said that in your best moments you don't have time for anything else. Indeed if you don't take pics it might just be because it was deeply interesting and not worth taking your smartphone out of your pocket.

I like to take 1 photo a day no matter what, and put it in my digital journal (Day One).

It is really nice to have a ritual where you review your day before bed; and after doing this for 5 years, I have an awesome photo journal.

Is this a 'be grateful' kind of thing ?

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