You have amnesia

Why we need tattoos and polaroids to cultivate wisdom.

Maybe it’s just me but I feel like my main obstacle in becoming a better person is my fickle memory. I don’t learn from my mistakes because I forget them. I repeatedly burn my hands on the same hot stoves.

I have a good memory for concepts but a bad memory for causes. When I try to recall the events that lead me to my present life, I’m a quasi-amnesiac. I can’t tell which choices from earlier this week made this day good or bad.

In this sense I’m basically the guy from Memento. Maybe you are too.

Guy Pearce stars as a man who suffers from anterograde amnesia, resulting in short-term memory loss and the inability to form new memories. He is searching for the people who attacked him and killed his wife, using an intricate system of Polaroid photographs and tattoos to track information he cannot remember. - Wikipedia

I suspect that many people suffer from chronic, deeply consequential, but hard to notice memory loss. Most of us would benefit from having polaroids and tattoos to remind us of what matters.

Before you think I’m being extreme, consider that if you had anterograde amnesia you wouldn’t remember that you had it. Your bad memory would be a blindspot to learning that you have a bad memory. Without some sort of external reminder, you’d continue living in short, unproductive and confusing loops.

Left to your own devices you might occasionally wonder why “things don’t work out for you”. Or maybe you’d just have a vague feeling that something is wrong with you.

Context Switching in the Attention Economy

Our maladaptive digital ecology is the primary reason why many of us feel like amnesiacs.

Most memory problems are downstream of salience problems. You’re more likely to remember something if it stands out as important to you. Salience is that property by which something stands out.

In contrast, a constantly shifting salience landscape means nothing is important. Nothing earns its way into memory. Every new context undermines what’s relevant in the previous one.

A salience landscape is the way a cognitive agent determines relevance through decisions about how to commit its attentional, metabolic, temporal, and behaviour resources in a highly complex, dynamic, and self-organizing manner. - John Vervaeke

Have you ever had a heated argument with a friend that was interrupted by the waiter asking for your order? You probably stopped arguing. Your mood was forced to shift to accommodate the new context for ordering food. Maybe you even forgot what you were arguing about.

Or consider an introverted Friday night. You want to stay home but a cajoling friend gets you to a house party. Moments after arriving you completely forget why you thought you needed alone time.

Every social context has its own salience landscape. Most of us care enough about social harmony that we naturally shift our priorities to accommodate what’s currently salient.

In the physical world, context changes infrequently. The corresponding shifts in salience are healthy and adaptive. On the other hand, the digital environment (where we all live) enables a supernormal rate of context switching.

Consider the average CCP Propaganda feed TikTok feed. In 10mins of viewing, a user is likely to experience 40 different clips, each with their own contexts and narrative arches. Each swipe comes with a shift in your salience landscape. What was important in clip 1 is completely different from clip 10.

Even if you’re smart enough to avoid feeds, you probably have more than 1 tab open in your browser as you read this. You’re likely a keystroke away from your email inbox or a half-played YouTube video.

These days most of us spend most of our time in front of screens. Even when we leave our computers, we carry our black mirrors in our pockets. Every browser tab, email subject line, or notification is a portal into a new context of values. Every time you click on something, you step into someone else’s marketing funnel. You consent to a new salience landscape.

I suspect that the sheer density of these prompts means we lose sight of what matters most. Nothing important gets encoded into memory and we all end up like the guy from Memento.

The Diegetic Weekly Review

Never underestimate the power of mundane solutions to complex problems.

The tyrannical rise of the attention economy is bigger and more existentially threatening than a few fickle memories. But memory problems are personal, highly consequential and interestingly, relatively simple to solve.

Last year I discovered a basic solution to my Memento issue. I just took time to review my week. I found my own version of tattoos and polaroids.

For 30mins every Sunday, I skim recent journal entries and calendar events to find out what I did in the previous 7 days. I review social outings, workouts, workdays and mistakes. It looks something like this:

(You can copy my template here)

For each day of the week I jot down 2-3 bullet points for what happened. Then I celebrate my wins and forgive my mistakes. When each day is filled up I ask myself:

What advice would you give Daniel?

What advice would you give this peculiar body-mind that your corner of consciousness happens to be responsible for?

If you read last week’s entry, this will already seem familiar to you.

I know it sound simple but somehow, this process engenders intentions that require minimal will-power to implement. All I need to do is highlight the relationships between my actions and their consequences. Somehow that’s enough for me to learn my mistakes and not repeat them.

This is salience management. I have a few life practices in this domain that I’ll share in the coming weeks.

I call it this one The Diegetic Weekly Review to distinguish it from The GTD Weekly Review. It emphasizes knowing your own story over planning your week.

Diegesis - “to narrate”

If you want to try this yourself, here’s my template again. If you have any questions about it my DMs are open.

Isn’t this overkill?

Yes. These practices are a bit weird.

Who has the time to journal regularly and review their entries weekly? Surely it’s not necessary or natural for a good life, right?

I used to feel this way. In fact, my default disposition is to be disinclined from rigid practices like journaling, GTD or scheduling. Historically this has prevented me from establishing weird but highly leveraged habits.

Now I’ve recognized that default reality is weirder. Left to our own devices (literally) we will unconsciously engage in all manner of bizarre practices that have nothing to do with living well.

Perhaps we once lived in a less dystopian era with more stable salience landscapes. Today we don’t. The average person’s life has become so unwieldily that life practices are not optional.

Jordan Hall once said that if a child grows up in an environment littered with hand-grenades, their natural curiosity will lead them to pull the pin every time. When our default environment is toxic to our naturalness, our only hope is a culture of teachings and practices to bring us back to health and sanity.

Daniel