When Years Have Passed, Will You Remember Today? [video] | Hacker News Reader

When Years Have Passed, Will You Remember Today? [video]

blog.bucketlistly.com

27 pointspeachananr13 comments

I spent a year backpacking (got back last summer), one of the most striking things is I can point back to any date of the trip and instantly know where I was, what I did, how I felt. The density of experience is intense, it makes for a strange hard to pin down hollowness on return.

I have had similar periods of time in my own life, but even these have begun to fade over many years. Luckily, there are plenty of techniques to avoid this and many are not new. E.g., Diarists have used writing to remember day-by-day for centuries. For travelers like you, remembering or recoding locations by date definitely helps to organize memories.

Unlike a written diary, which is conceptual, I like how Cesar is systematically compiling small visual queues using a discipline amounting to a form of sampling or measurement. I'm not sure how a video beats a photo-of-the-day, but perhaps it simplifies the overall process of selecting images?

I'm also guessing that his daily sampling method might control for the natural tendency of sensational moments and aspects of life to eclipse the less sensational parts over time.

I'm not sure how a video beats a photo-of-the-day

I hadn't thought about this before but perhaps it's because the mind doesn't actually remember snapshot images, we don't work that way. We remember events comprising several images, sounds, smells and emotions. In that way, perhaps describing memory as a series of short video snippets is more accurate than the traditional photographic memory model.

I often mess around trying to sequentially picture each room or spot we slept in (50+), walk about them mentally, its interesting how acute (but admittedly malleable) memory can be.

This is a great idea, I'd love to do that too. But how would one actually go about this?

Does he just film everything with a camera or his phone? He must spend a lot of time manually going through all the footage to find the second that best represents that day. And surely he has to do this everyday too whilst all the memories are fresh in his mind so he can find the most important second? And then he manually strings them all into a video?

Sounds like a lot of work (although the results certainly seem worth it). Or am I missing something here? How would you guys go about it?

He made an app for that.

"Would you rather record yourself in front of a computer or yourself walking outside experiencing life?"

I wouldn't feel too guilty about recording one-second screenshots. I get a lot of enjoyment out of writing, designing, programming and working on other creative online projects.

Having a balanced life, which includes outdoor activities, is definitely important, but I wouldn't discount the value of learning, creating and communicating in a digital space.

Having a boring life in which most day's memorable second is similar to the previous one is not a bad thing. It's living a meaningless life we should be weary of.

Shameless plug: but I do want to indulge in the ego pampering of storing memories of my life, so I wrote an app to do just that --- and save geolocated notes and photos not only in your iphone, but also in google's servers, using fusion tables and picasaweb. The free version is https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/geopostrfree-remember-share/... and the .99 add-free version is https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/geopostr-remember-your-walk/...

Honestly, I'm not a fan of the whole thing. Why would I want to remember every single day? I'd much rather spend the time required to compose these 1 second bits on building up and moving towards a much more significant moment.

There are some interesting comments in previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5025498

I didn't know I his app he was working on had launched... Indeed it has!

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/1-second-everyday/id58782354...

On mobile, none of the custom header or the sidebars show up. In other words, I see only what seems to be the default Tumblr mobile layout, with no links to the product page, etc. Kinda defeats the purpose of the blog.

Great post thank you

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