I Just Can't Remember

I ask myself, "Is this how I used to feel?" Was I always this anxious, this fretful about the future, this troubled by personal and world events? I'm not sure.

I am often puzzled by how difficult it is to remember the past. I don't mean the history in books. I am talking about my past. I can reconstruct the general sequence of events and timelines. But I struggle to remember how I felt at particular times in my life. And since I can't really remember my previous emotional states, I have some trouble gauging how I am doing now.

For example, I am pretty sure that my emotional "set points" were altered because of the death of my first wife, Anne. I don't think I was as prone to anxiety, to the blues, and to reflections on meaninglessness as I am now. But based on my own recollections, I can't say for sure. In my subjective experience, it just seems like it has always been this way.

I, however, don't think that's true.

"A general limitation of the human mind," writes Daniel Kahneman, " is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past sates of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or of any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed" (Thinking, Fast and Slow, page 202). 

I find that to be accurate in every way. And it's even more true when the world has changed for me in such a significant way. Now, when I read journal reflections from several years ago, it is like I am investigating the life of another person. This can be disconcerting. But it's also helpful. This is perhaps the best reason to keep some sort of journal. It is a record of how I once thought--in fact, the only reliable record of how I once thought. Even asking others who knew me isn't all that helpful. Their memories have been altered as well.

We need such tools to remind us that our ongoing memories are both malleable and fallible. I cannot view the past from the perspective of ten years ago. I can only view the past through the lens of my life now. Every time I take out a memory and re-live it, I am actually reprocessing it as a new memory.

Is it any wonder that public figures begin to report experiences that they never had? Our memories can do that to us. Suddenly we have done things, said things, felt things, believed things, that we did not actually do, say, feel or believe in the past. And worst of all, we are sure that we did.

Perhaps the most important person on the staff of a celebrity ought to be the memory fact-checker. This might be the person who keeps the celebrity's memories from getting too far off the reality-track. I suspect that this was one of the functions of the court fool (jester) in older times--to remind the ruler that self-justifying memories cannot be trusted.

So on the one hand, I have deep sympathy for the public figures who seem to have made up experiences out of thin air. On the other hand, they can employ folks to keep them honest if that's really what they want.

Or they could just keep a journal.