I read on Mastodon a couple of days back that someone I follow has deleted her longtime files of collected notes and reminders, and has experienced a huge weight off her shoulders as a result. And I immediately knew that I could never do that.
Her points are quite sound: The ever-growing list of books she wants to read but will simply never have time to get to. That if ideas are important, they will float back to the surface of her mind (a point I’ve heard many times before), that so studiously taking notes and reminders gets overwhelming and self-fulfilling; a thing one does not ostensibly for practical future use, but because that’s just what one has always done. The list of what was deleted goes on, each category explained, and all completely warranted.
I, however, wouldn’t do that. Because I have a Danish memory.
I confess I don’t know if this is an actual physiological thing among the Danes or just something I came up with — I’d be more than happy to fly to Denmark to run an extended study, if anyone knows of a grant I could get to do it — but it seems airtight at least in a personal way.
My (100% Danish) father has confessed that he’s got, and as always had, a spotty memory for some things.
My (100% Danish) aunt has said the same thing, going on to say that her memory is bad enough that when she had a home phone — anyone under 35, ask your parents what that was — she kept a notepad beside it because she knew that trying to remember something she was told on the phone long enough to relay it after the call, or write it on the calendar, etc., didn’t often work. That literally, between hanging up and reciting the information to her husband or jotting it down right after the call was problematic often enough that having a notepad to catch the particulars during the call was just safer.
Now granted, I’m only 50% Danish, though to look at my last name and eye colour and complexion, you’d think I was Dane through and through. The memory issues my father and aunt have, however, are full-blown for me.
I sometimes forget having met people. If I have met them, there’s a really good chance I won’t remember their names.
I’m better in both respect with pets, for whatever reason, but even that’s hit and miss.
My wife has known for our entire relationship that if she asks me to do something before she leaves for work in the morning — let alone the day before — there’s a really good chance I’ll forget to do it. Again, not nearly everything and for sure not every time, but unless it involves a routine or important thing, you wouldn’t lose often on betting I’d forget it. And even routine or important things sometimes fall by the wayside.
I used to make physical notes for myself as reminders, and we still collectively make liberal use of physical yearly calendars we hang in the kitchen (my wife isn’t Danish, so this particular Maybe Genetic Affliction doesn’t affect her, but she has a lot of plates spinning at any one time and understandably can’t keep absolutely everything in her head all at once), but lately my notes have gotten more and more digital. My countless notebooks of writing ideas over the decades have largely, though still not completely, given way to “jotting them down” on my phone and/or computer, which I routinely sync so they both share things like To Do lists, etc.
All the note taking is because if I don’t write stuff down — from adding milk to the shopping list, or even needing to shop at all, to a book or phrase I want to look up, to a really cool idea for a story that just struck me — there’s a very good chance I’ll forget it. Sometimes even after repeatedly reminding myself.
While I’ve heard plenty of people say that in their experience a good idea will return to them so they basically don’t bother with making a note of it, that very rarely happens to me. I can say with total certainty that I’ve had ideas for stories before that I’ve been very smitten by, but hadn’t had the means to get the idea down on paper or digitally in the moment, and they were shortly forgotten and stayed forgotten. The irony is that I’ll often later remember enough to recall that I had an idea, but not enough to know what the idea was. Sometimes I can sit and really focus on it, reliving in my head what I was doing when the idea came to me, and can recall what the idea was, but that’s exceedingly rare. It’s almost always gone for good, and there’s probably some very specific German word for feeling that unique loss.
I should say at this point that this memory issue doesn’t fall into the category of cognitive lack due to the pervasiveness of devices that will remember things for me. This is a relatively recent argument that I absolutely believe has at least some merit — as just one personal example, I and most people I ask who are over 40 can remember their childhood home phone numbers, but very few know the phone numbers here and now of their spouses or other important people in their lives; one of those was burned into our memories early by needing to know it and by repetition and use, while the other has almost never even needed to be known at all because it’s just captured once and kept on your cell phone and stays there indefinitely regardless of whether or not you know it, so your brain doesn’t bother to retain it, and that’s a new and increasing problem in society — but that isn’t what’s happening in my case.
On the contrary, I’ve had a bad memory for things for as long as I can remember (ha!), so having these devices on hand so often is something of a godsend. I wasn’t remembering this stuff and had to write it down to keep some record of it, but now there’s something near me almost 24/7 that will remember it for me and remind me of it any time I need it. To be clear, I don’t like having to rely on devices so much (good thing we have that physical calendar as well; ironically, sometimes calendar content on my phone isn’t reflected on the physical calendar and vice-versa, which makes for some occasional surprise reminders when we notice those items), but it’s honestly been fantastic to have these devices for this particular use. It’s only through physical and digital note-taking and brainstorming that I can retain most of my story and character and tabletop game ideas. I go back through those physical and digital notes at times and always find stuff that I literally don’t recall writing at all, but there it all is, clearly in my writing style and/or handwriting. (Hmm… being reminded of something one did but totally forgot ever doing has some solid foundation for a story idea. It’s both ironic and meta that I’ll have to write that down somewhere.)
So, while I completely get the relief that some people may feel of unburdening themselves of years or even decades of constant note-taking that they’ve inadvertently buried themselves under, I live with low-key anxiety that such a mass deletion ever would happen to me. That’s among the reasons I sync my phone and computers, and why I try to get digital copies of any physical notes I write, and then back up my digital files. Nothing lasts forever (notebooks go missing or get left behind or can get lost along with so much else in house fires; digital files can get corrupted or deleted or become locked away when a digital storage company is bought or sold or goes bankrupt, etc.), and while it has sometimes been a pain to clear up which copy of a story (for instance) is the most recent one, I’d rather have too many copies of notes, and of plenty of past work, than have it all go missing forever.