Hacker News Reader

Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

Regarding "No one ever takes a photograph of something they want to forget" - I take photos of things all the time of things precisely so I can forget them - I take pictures of gates closed on farmland, electrical items switched off etc. I never look at these pictures again - but the simple act of taking the picture means I don't fret about them afterwards....

View on HN

Many of the pictures I take have a lifetime, sometimes measured in hours or minutes. A restaurant I passed by before dinner that I'd like to check out later in the evening; a sign in a language I want to translate; a visual demonstration of where I am so people know where to find me in a busy train station; any number of things whose worth is almost immediately used up and subsequently deleted.

I usually keep them as a random diary of where I've been and when things happened.

When you try to recall some past moments, do you recall the moment as you saw it with your eyes or do you recall the photo of it?

I have noticed this lately that when I try to recall (e.g. a moment or time with my family) all I get back is one of the photos of it. I don't usually take photos, when I do I try not to look at them for the exact same reason as they seem to replace the actual snapshot of the moment I saw with my own damn eyes.

But I recall a lot less snapshots of what I saw with my own eyes compared to what I can recall in terms of photos.

We take photos of our kids to track and timestamp anaphylaxis or other medical reasons. Incredibly important at the time, and then when dynamic wallpapers start mixing them in to the roster you desperately want to forget them.

Seems to me you're making sure you don't forget them by outsourcing the "remembering" to a more reliable system.

It's something like that, quite an effective tactic for dealing with my neurotic/OCD tendencies though :-)

I'm the same. I offload stuff to my phone's camera. Not really "offload" because I barely load it into my brain, just photograph it and don't worry about it. It has saved my mass quite a few times.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com