It can be concerning to realise how little you actually remember about your life. I’m young and healthy (as far as I know) and yet my 24 year-old brain only remembers about 5-15 specific occasions from, for example, 2018, when I was 18. I can picture them visually, though actually drumming them up is a challenge in itself. We remember hardly anything in our lives! When I realised this a couple of years ago, I panicked, and realised I wanted to preserve as much as possible, so I bought a GoPro and started trying to film as much of my daily life as possible, so that I could have it stored somewhere easily accessible, somewhere I could visit and suddenly bring back all those memories I was dropping as I wander through the years.
A month later, I stopped filming and returned the GoPro. It was a futile exercise in the end. I was stressing myself out when I forgot to include a detail while narrating something that had happened in the day (‘if I’m recording, I might as well be thorough’). In the moment I became distracted because I was panicking about when I would next be able to film a log of everything that had just occurred. And worst of all, when I watched footage of myself retelling a story for the GoPro, I could hardly remember the original occasion and felt myself imagining what had happened instead of calling on my memory, as had been the point of it all. Because we naturally forget those in-between moments, I was forgetting them straight after filming them, and then watching back they all just seemed new. I realised we ought to live in the moment and only occasionally mourn the fact that we don’t make more memories.