Ten years of remembering every day that passes (2022)

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.

Reminds me of a Borges story (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funes_the_Memorious, https://vigeland.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”.

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.

Reminds me of the ending of 'The Masochistic Playpen' (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/338429.The_Masochistic_P...), in which the protagonist is forced to re-watch every single day of his life from conception, realizing that at some point if he lives long enough he will get to the point where has to re-watch himself re-watching his entire life, a sort of "squaring" of the tedium.

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.

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)

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

This is basically my dad. He almost routinely asks me about things that happened 10 or 15 years ago.

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.

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)

Do you happen to have the source code publicly available?

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.

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.

Making an exception for X might just indicate an ignorance of Y and Z and others.

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

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.

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.

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/

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!

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.

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.

i can feel for you (i think) but my conclusion would be different. for one, you don't have to write about feelings. second, the problem here is not the feelings themselves but the attribution for the cause.

this is something that i learned and confirmed over time, and that this diary seems to demonstrate. namely that as humans we have a tendency to attribute reasons to actions of others that are based on our own feelings and have nothing to do with reality.

for example, a few months ago someone yelled at me for bumping into him, claiming to have done that intentionally, when on my side i didn't even feel any contact. so how could this person jump to that conclusion? they clearly didn't stop to think and consider if there could be another explanation.

what i learned from this over the years is that whenever something negative happens to me, i stop to think if there could be a good explanation that does not imply some negative intent by anyone else.

i have met other people who attribute netative intentions to any thing bad that happens to them, often telling me stories of what they think was someones intention, when there could be a perfectly benign explanation. like one where someones macbook charger got lost, and the person was 100% sure that her colleague took it intentionally in order to be mean, when the begning explanation is that because those chargers look all alike, she probably took it, thinking it was hers, or, maybe it even was hers, and the first persons charger was lost elsewhere.

this is a general problem in human interaction. only if we stop attributing negative intention to everything that we don't agree with, will we be able to improve cooperation to work for a better world.

Yeah. I remember vacations the most. And that is enough for me.

Live your life one day at a time.

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.

"I don't want to remember nothing, nothing, you understand?!" [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLv6ycYcpGI

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?

That's real. There are whole years of my email archives I have troubles looking into.

Time heals (i.e. dampens) not just extreme sadness but also irrational exuberance.

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.

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.