(No. 6) Can you repeat the question?

There’s no use for a replay button anyways

I have a habit of doubling back after a movie or TV show to watch specific scenes again. Especially if I see it in theaters, I will absolutely scour Youtube¹ later that night.

We can’t rewatch life like this. Thanks to Black Mirror, we can visualize why this might not be so bad. In an episode, infidelity competes with implantable memories for the title of “how uncomfortable can we make this episode concept.”

As far as technology has brought us, lived moments aren’t in a data bank or on Youtube for revisiting. The precise color of her shirt is gone. The tone of my voice is gone. Pasted over by what I think happened. Consciously or unconsciously this changes our actions and I think we’re spared our precise memories.

We’re born into a cocktail of nature and nurture that propels us to make decisions in such a way. Imagine how it was in 1920 with a lifespan of 53-54? That poor poor prefrontal cortex only had about 25 years of fully developed rock and roll time. I sometimes wonder if older age alone makes smarter decisions.

I think it’s by design that we forget. I think we’re meant to be watermills, forwards and forwards and what happens on either side is lost to a great body of water.

But we don’t return to that great body anymore. We see over and over again through our camera roll and Instagram stories. We’re haunted on social media by the middle school bullies and bullied we would’ve forgotten about in the 90’s.

We have digestible “prefab” moments in movies and TV shows to feast on. Memories that aren’t ours. But we consume them as if they are. Researcher Brené Brown even famously teaches with movie clips because we can recognize emotion so well in them.

Do you think reality TV stars ever go back and watch their episodes? In Love Island, contestants say completely different things from one episode to the next. As a viewer, I have my own ideas of what they’re thinking. Heck, I even have a kind of proof! But they’re in a bubble. They hear things once if they hear them at all. And you watch as they slowly bend their past words into something more advantageous. To have this proof immortalized on TV seems like a kind of torture to me. It is true, though, that sometimes we really don’t say what we mean. Sometimes we lie.

We have more memories. Cosmic memories of the human tendency towards storytelling. The tendency that bore religions and prejudices and magic and more.

A semester-long course I took back in (privileged liberal arts) college called Introduction to the Bible, taught by the fabulous Dr. Maia Kotrosits, focused heavily on the power of storytelling in antiquity. Ballads, scriptures, and paintings were sources of news, entertainment, laws, and advice— they were everything to ancient people. Oppressed Israelites were woven of stories in a way that sculpted the identity of Jewish culture.²

I learned from an episode of the podcast People I (Mostly) Admire featuring the author of Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari, that:

• people listen to stories,

• people want stories more than facts, data, theory, or statistics,

• and people like stories with other people in them.

  

Over the holidays, my cousin and I devoured my grandma’s basket of 5x7 printed photos. The basket sits out on her coffee table for perusing guests. One photo of this person, a photo of that old house, this dog, that dog.

The basket tells a bigger story than what we’re used to. Moments are condensed. People are grouped into one tale of a family with ties and tentacles and dropping off points.

My cousin took iPhone photos of the prints we’d never seen before. I told her she was “doing god’s work.” Now we can have these photos.

We’re not used to telling stories about a whole. The media we see is about parts—our vacations, our haircuts. One day. Another day. It’s almost strange to have photos of far-away nieces and nephews we’ve never met.

Stories in history have always had stars in them, but now everyone is a star and we’re stars to ourselves. We don’t need the story of how mountains were created, we need the story of the best recipe for our workday lunches (which are, without a doubt, very challenging meals to execute).

A single remark from Love Island could be revisited and dissected (by me) into infinity but we have thousand-year gaps in human history. Stories are getting smaller. It’s harder to remember them so we record them in high resolution.

But it’s amazing how much I’d rather watch a TV show episode I’ve seen before than look at my own camera roll videos. I don’t think we crave our own stories. I think we crave terraced stories. Ones that we relate to but don’t star in.

But for all the mutations, what we can’t change about stories is how they mirror their maker. They’re linear. (Minus some recent movies and sci-fi novels).

It’s a relief, though, I think. This single thread of moments gives us time to digest our thoughts after things happen. And the story ends like they all do. We have time in the grave to stretch our legs and throw away the popcorn container.

They can't not end. We obsess over gamification—how did we get so obsessed streaks?—because we fundamentally live in non-gamification.

I might lose some people here buuut I think that as much as we try, as much as we color code our planners and “balance” our meals, things happen to us and around us with no reason. A wonderful chaotic entropy that we fight our whole lives to deny.

And where does that leave our memories? If we’re supposed to forget like a watermill and we can’t hold onto the reins of our lives, should we even bother remembering our wrongs?

Well, yes. As the great Anna Nalick says in Breathe 2 am, “And these mistakes you've made, you'll just make them again.” But I don’t think we should (or can) remember them as well as we think.

We watch the “Youtube clips” of our lives through our dreams. Colored by the fray of our subconscious. Cooked up in the evil lab of wanting. Dreams are how we create memories of our daily experiences. And they’re so inaccurate.

We forget little details like whose birthday is when and what our favorite movie is, but I think it’s natural if even a good thing. We’re made for big stories.

Our dream rewatching sessions are perhaps better than recalling everything. We’d be a different species if we could remember every mistake and triumph perfectly. We wouldn’t be human anymore. We’d be better.

But we’re not. We’re in the slush of the great body of the watermill. Enjoy it with me.

[Fin]

The memories-color-our-actions crowdsourced essential reading +/ watching list.

Movies:

• Total Recall (1990)

• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

• Atonement (2007)

• The Zero Theorem (2013)

• Momento (2000)

• Click (2006)

TV Shows:

• The Good Place (2016-2020)

Books:

• Recursion by Blake Crouch [Thriller] [Time Travel] [Mystery]

• The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin (my favorite author) [Sci-fi] [Dystopian] [Speculative]

• Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman [Mental Health] [Romance]

• The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides [Psychological] [Thriller]

• In Five Years by Rebecca Serle [Mystery] [Romance]

• Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au [Japanese Lit] [Contemporary] [Relationships]

• Tokyo Ueno Station by Miri Yū [Magical Realism] [Historical Fiction]

• In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss by Amy Bloom [Death] [Alzheimer's]

• The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab [Fantasy] [Historical] [Romance]

Short stories:

• “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick [Sci-fi] [Speculative]

• “Droll Tales” by Iris Smyles [Fiction] [Humor]

  

1. This most recently happened with Padmé’s profession of love in Star Wars II (reason for fascination: disbelief) and Margot’s “I’m the chef now” speech in The Menu (reason for fascination: admiration).

2. If you’d like to know more about Greco-Roman storytelling in antiquity, here’s a resource. If you’d like to know more about the importance of stories in Jewish culture, try this. It’s worth noting that the Old Testament was primarily written in Hebrew, while the New Testament was primarily written in ancient Greek.

I was raised Catholic and born in 1996 so I’m not an authoritative source of information on ancient history or Judaism.

There is also a wealth of history from other cultures that is inaccessible to current scholars because it was either destroyed or erased by practices of colonialism and white supremacy.