Too Many Memories

Forgetting to Forget: Why Memory Needs an Editor

There are, it is said, only seven plots in literature. Be that as it may, there are countless different ways of telling them. If both Homer, in The Odyssey, and George Lucas, in Star Wars, were offering versions of “The Hero’s Journey”, only the latter thought to add spaceships to the mix. The form of stories we tell reflects the world in which we live.

Take, for example, the kitchen sink drama. Not, like Homer or Star Wars, tales of great heroism, more an accumulation of, often grinding, details of the type of life which does not attract a biographer. Traditionally, these might be set in the type of town which was industrial but was clearly on the cusp of becoming post-industrial.

No longer.

For modern technology has cut out the middlemen of directors, scriptwriters and so on and allowed unvarnished access to the lives of others in a new genre we might call the “day-in-the-life” video, currently spreading across social media in the way the novel did in the nineteenth century.

There is, however, more of a fixed format than one finds in the work of Austen, Bronte and Dumas. The protagonist records their daily comings-and-goings and posts them to the internet. The protagonist must be of a certain type – youngish (25-35), female, professional, living in a big city. And the “plot” must be of a certain type – our heroine gets up (early), gets washed, dressed and goes through a skincare/make-up routine, commutes to work, grabs breakfast/coffee, gets to the office. At this point we fade out, resuming with leaving the office to get some lunch and, potentially, indulge in some retail therapy. Lunch (usually a salad, occasionally sushi) will be taken at the desk before another cut. Then it is time to pack up the desk, go home – potentially via the gym if this has not happened on the way to work – then dinner (generally a collection of ingredients arranged in a bowl), before a shower, further skincare and bed (quite early).

I am, I would be the first to admit, probably not the target audience for these productions, being, at the very least, the wrong age and sex, but there is something I find curiously fascinating about them.

I can just about understand the impulse behind making them – we are all the stars of our own movies, technology, specifically the camera-phone, allows us to be the stars in actual movies. The stars have professional jobs, live in big cities and have sufficient disposable income to fund their skincare needs. By the lights of society’s narrative, they have achieved success. Why not display it? Attract an audience, and there may be money and freebies from brands who have decided you are an influencer.

I can just about understand the impulse behind watching them (beyond my own detached sociological observations, of course) – we find other people fascinating. Sometimes to admire them (to students of my generation, This Life was a documentary about what our lives would be like when we left university), more often to criticise them – she moisturises before she exfoliates, the animal! To the algo, a hate watch is every bit as valuable as a love watch.

But I cannot entirely understand what I am seeing. The videos, as we have established, are formulaic. No matter where they are shot, the same boxes are ticked (American producers sometimes put a daring twist on the genre by having a dog). Am I watching a life, or a performance designed, like a kabuki play, to operate within a strict set of rules? Are the similarities due to convergent evolution – different people finding the same solution to the same problem – or conformity - a record of life, but not an individual’s life?

If they are a way of displaying one’s success in a particular system, does what we see make us think that success is worthwhile? For the videos are very much “Same sh*t, different day”. The same events repeat from video to video with minimal change – perhaps lunch is sushi, not salad; perhaps the gym trip takes place before work, not after. Every bit as monotonous as an Alan Sillitoe factory worker, albeit with more expensively tended skin.

The videos, though, are not really dramas; they are one-(wo)man plays. The only other people who exist in them are in the background. Extras with whom the heroine never interacts unless buying something from them (there may, to be fair, be privacy issues here). Nor are they comedies. The heroine rarely if ever smiles, let alone laughs. Every act - from work, to cooking, to skincare - is undertaken with the same rigid and faintly grim focus and determination. If you were writing about the atomisation and anomie of late Capitalism, they would be a perfectly good place to start.

We will, however, leave that to others. Instead, we shall focus on the advantage Sillitoe’s hero had over our modern heroines. He may have lived in a run-down terrace in a run-down town. He may have been covered in grime and callouses. But he could forget.

Let’s try an experiment. What did you have for lunch last Tuesday? You probably can’t remember. The important thing is that you had lunch – the body needs its fuel. In the modern world, this is not usually a problem, so the specifics are not very important. We are so used to being fed when we need to be that we do not see any specific significance in it happening. We might, if we have a routine, know what we had – Tuesday is ham sandwich day. Or there might have been something special about it which made us remember it – we had lunch with a friend we hadn’t seen for ages or we contrived to burn our ham sandwich and it was horrible.

Absent some special circumstance though, it would be like countless other events in our lives. Something we did. And have no memory of doing.

There is, perhaps, something faintly terrifying about this. The notion that we do so many things of which we have no subsequent knowledge. That we are responsible for so many things of which we have no subsequent knowledge. That we are present but apparently not involved in huge swathes of our lives. These videos, and the associated but more private habit we have developed of taking photos of everything, are an attempt to fight against the dying of the light of our memories.

But we learn to cope. We know we have few if any memories of infancy (I can confidently get back to two and a half – sitting in the car waiting for my parents to close up the house they had just sold, playing with the toy car my now ex-neighbours had given me) but no further. We know that we just won’t remember things we do not consider important – last week’s lunch, the plot of the film we watched out of boredom the other day, Pythagoras’ Theorem – and that’s fine. We trust our internal editor to work out what is significant and what is not, and we are happy to live according to its red pen.

This is a Substack and thus has no editor. As you can possibly tell. But maligned though they often are, the breed plays a vital role. They trim away the extraneous, leaving behind the important; they polish the gems and remove anything that distracts from them. What they leave on the page gains lustre because it has been left on the page. Without their efforts, all that is left is a messy melange of the vital and the trivial, and no easy way to tell the difference. It is our minds’ decision to remember that tells us events are significant.

Modern technology interferes with this process. Computer memory is cheap, so we can record whatever we come across and because we can, we do. Camera film was expensive, both to buy and to develop, so we used it sparingly, only capturing the things we knew really counted – birthday parties, holidays etc. Now we just point and click. Holidays and birthdays, yes, but also the donut we are about to eat, or the serum we have just bought.

What we are left with is not a history, but an archive. No shape, or narrative, or ordering of significance, just an accumulation of data, each piece just as important as any other. There is no story to it, just the relentless amassing of detail. No highs and lows, no light and shade, just salad after salad, gym session after gym session. Everything is grey because everything is there.

These videos are a new phenomenon. They have to be. The technology to make them did not exist until recently. As with any new technology, it will take us time to adapt, to work out how best to use it. But by using it to remember, we have forgotten how important it is to forget. It is only by ruthlessly stripping away the trivial, that the important things really stand out and shine in our minds. Perhaps that is why the lives in these videos seem so flat. Because they’re not allowed to be anything else. When everything’s important, nothing is.