I can't remember shit. And I forget that I can't remember anything at all until I'm around my grandparents, boomers, or otherwise labeled "older" individuals. When I say "older" I mean the generations who were not brought up with tech. I am not referring to an age, or a hill, or a specific data point in which a "young" person becomes "old;" I don't believe in this, actually. I think our bodies grow tired and weaker in a physical sense, but the human being - human spirit - never gets "old." I'm not sure we ever fully become "adults" either, but that's for another day.
We're all aware that grandparents like to talk, and that time seems to be a non-issue when they launch into every excruciating detail of a story. I'm not sure how many times I've heard, "Well, wait a moment, what was his name? He had a daughter named Julie...whose sister-in-law, Emma lived on Mulberry Lane back in 1972. Just across the street from that old dairy farm that closed in the 80's. What year was that, hun? 84'? Anyway...."
Holy shit, grandpa! How the hell do you remember all that?
Pay attention to the mumbly rambles of the older generations! They're absolutely jam-packed with details I almost never provide in my stories. Half the time, my main character is "what's-her-face" who has no known living relatives, no known addresses, and no other defining characteristics other than what's relevant to the point I'm trying to make.
It blows my mind the amount of information the older generations seem to hold inside their long-term memory stores. And how accessible their long-term memory seems to be! I swear I'd need hypnosis to gather enough information to match the level of detail that older generations consistently provide.
I thought about this for a long time. Why? Why do my grandparents have seemingly larger memory stores than I have? Is it the trauma? Is it the weed? Even if it was trauma-based or drug-influenced, it still doesn't add up. Even before any real life experience was thrust upon me, I never collected such specified data points from my surroundings. I know my childhood address, but I do not know my first apartment address from college.
When I look back at my life, I can't figure out what year I was in which grade without sitting down and doing the math. I'm serious! And I even had a trick for it growing up because the year it was, was the grade I was in. Yep. If it was 2005, I was starting the 5th grade. Or was that the back-half of fifth grade? Did I end the year in the grade I was in or start it? I need to do some math.
I remember what year I graduated high school! Only because it was my favorite number, though.
And that's my issue with this. Something is fundamentally wrong with the way my brain stores memories; more so, the lack of storage it does. I could not for the life of me put my finger on it because I couldn't figure out what was so fundamentally different between the life experience of older generations and the life experience of younger generations. And then it clicked. Tech! The motherfucking internet!
The tech era child-brain is wired completely differently than the pre-tech era brain when it comes to memory and I'll tell you why. It's a simple case of system overload. We have the ability to socialize, learn, and reach any piece of information we want right at our fingertips. I started really thinking about this, and I think this is why younger people seem to have shitty memories. Information overload!
Just take doom-scrolling for example. You zone out to some degree while your eyes take in messages and content and news; faces, articles, opinions, misinformation. Scroll, scroll, scroll. And you don't even have to be fully paying attention! But your brain is. And it's trying to filter through all of this, right?
The reason your grandparents can remember their neighbors address from the 3-year stretch they lived in Hawaii 40 years ago? It's the only information they had to worry about! They'd take out their little address books and scribble down all the information as not to lose it. Birthdays, phone numbers (eventually), and everything that we can simply look up on someone's profile, got filed into their long-term memory stores instead. It's why they remember recipes too! Why commit a recipe to memory when you can google it every thanksgiving? Everyone and their mother has a food blog somewhere.
Essentially, our tech-laden brains decided that the internet was good enough. Because we can have any answer within seconds through a simple search engine, we no longer need to keep that information inside.
I don't think the human brain was prepared for the high level of processing power needed to handle the expanse of the internet. It just didn't! So, it panicked, and started filtering anything that wasn't a password or a screenname. Which, we now all have dozens of to remember that our grandparents did not.
Even PINs on credit cards, code combinations on electric garages, it's endless! The introduction of technology and; specifically, the internet, absolutely fucked our ability to store memories. And it's true; I know my passwords to things because if I don't? I lose what is "mine" how scary is that? Everything is online! And we all need some sort of code to access it. Tech put our long-term memory capabilities in the shitter and redirected that processing power to the internet.
And, we didn't decide this! I think our brains did! They saw something with near-human computing capabilities, and they took a vacation. In perpetuity.
And it's why the older generations are so averse to tech, I think they know. The computing capabilities of the human brain are far too unique to step back and rely on a machine to do your learning and expressing and your understanding. So they don't do it!
And you could certainly argue that you'd rather not have all that useless crap in your brain, it's nice that it lives on the internet where we can access it at will, but I'll be damned if it doesn't make socializing in the real world a little difficult. How long does it take before someone brings out their phone to explain something? How far did you get into that conversation before someone mentioned a post, article, or picture from the internet that could relate?
"I saw something about that the other day somewhere! Let me find it!" Scroll, scroll, scroll. Filter, filter; failure. What was I doing?
That kind of sucks. Does it make what we say a little more accurate? Depends where on the internet you're getting your information, but it certainly lessens the instances of saying something stupid or ignorant. If we can all just look it up immediately, we're less likely to take a stab at the answer to something just using our own deduction. It's the death of brainstorming. The storm is on the internet now!
It's not that your close friends don't care to remember your birthday, it's that the brain realized it did not have to store this information because it's clearly stated on their Facebook profile. I can remember my friends birthdays from middle school and it's been decades. I can't remember a single birthday of one of my high school friends, though. I got a social media account around the time I entered high school, and a smartphone my Junior year.
I used to know all my middle school friends numbers by heart because I'd have to dial them into the corded home phone on the wall of the kitchen. I don't know anyone's numbers now.
I will continue to be impressed with the level of nonsense details older generations seem to possess. My brain certainly does not have this capability. I'm not so sure future generations will ever have this capability.
And that is my explanation for why our memories are absolute shite; the Filing Failure Phenomenon. It's not the weed!
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