Daily Prompt – Memory on the Menu

Which good memories are better — the recent and vivid ones, or those that time has covered in a sweet haze?

Aren’t all memories better than none at all? Personally, I actually have quite vivid memories from my childhood, and what I experienced growing up…

…as for experiences I had a few months ago, or even twelve or more months ago… not a damn clue.

I find that the more recent memories are the ones that are either completely forgotten or are covered in haze. I find that I have memories of events, and get confused as to which year it happened. I recently read an article about society and our obsession with documenting everything with our phones and iPads etc… taking copious amounts of photos, and videos of everything, and as a result we don’t actually really experience anything; we’re not living in that moment, and we’re not truly experiencing everything in that moment, because we’re too busy worrying whether or not that selfie was in focus, or which fucking Instagram filter we choose, or whether we have enough space on our phones to record the whole thing.

That’s not really creating what I consider a memory. Yes, you can then get home and show your friends and say ‘Hey check this out, I went skydiving’, and then show everybody your thirty-seven selfies before you jump off the plane, then you play the video of you falling, and taking a selfie (or nine) whilst you’re falling, and then another twenty selfies once you hit the ground… that’s not an experience; that’s not a memory; that’s just you being so fucking self-absorbed. What do you remember from your experience? Do you remember feeling terrified going up in the plane and looking out the doorway before you jump? No? Oh is that because you were too concerned with which border to use on your selfies? What about the jump? Do you remember the extreme rush of adrenalin you had free-falling, plummeting through the air, hurtling towards the ground? No? Do you remember that slight sense of relief as soon as you pulled your cord on your parachute, sending a jolt through your body like whiplash, and then taking in the breathtaking view as you quietly floated back down to the ground? NO? OH, AND WAS THAT BECAUSE YOU WERE TOO BUSY MAKING SURE THAT YOUR HAIR WASN’T ALL MESSED UP FOR YOUR SELFIES?? IT DRIVES ME FUCKING CRAZY!!

Photos and videos certainly have their place in creating memories, but when you’re trying to document and record absolutely every memory and experience of your life, it all just melts into one big mess. It about choosing your moments, but finding a balance. Not everything needs to end up on Instagram, so you can show off to everybody else. That’s just dumb.

I have my iPhoto library stored on an external hard drive, to allow me to keep my photo’s off my computer so I don’t lose them in the event that my computer dies, and also to free up space on my computer’s hard drive. Now, I recently did a backup of all the photos on my iphone, and I haven’t done so for at least two years, so I plugged in my iPhoto drive, and whilst the program imported all the photos from my phone, I stumbled across photo albums from 7 – 8 years ago, and looking at photos from events that I had completely forgotten about… like the birthday celebration I had, which was fucking horrible – I had only a handful of people turn up which was fucking disappointing in itself, and out of those who did turn up, there was a few that I really wished weren’t there, and I just remember the entire day being really disappointing. It poured with rain, and the activities that we had planned for the day were cancelled because they were closed due to the rain. It was such a massive let down, and nobody had bothered to think of an alternative, so my birthday turned out to be a giant disappointing nothing! Now, I remember that day… but for the completely wrong reasons… and until I went through the photos from the day, I had since forgotten all about it – well, perhaps not forgotten, more like severely repressed instead.

NB: Let me just clarify that I’ve never been skydiving, and I don’t have Instagram.

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