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On Memory, and the Futility of Being Remembered.


‘If you had to choose, would you rather be able to only live in the moment, with each moment passing having no recollection of what happened but always be able to feel the emotion it brings or only be able to have memories of events as if the present is perennially in the past?’ was a question that came to me after a long day of fleeting precious moments. This angle makes you question what truly is important, as life is the culmination of memories made and the continuity of memories in the making. 


Why do we feel the need to document everything—pictures, videos, souvenirs? when there won't be a you in the distant future to reminisce about the good times? For whom do we collect and document our lives if it isn't purely for our satisfaction and the fear of forgetting. But again why does it matter if we forget when we won't be here long enough to bear feelings to the guilt it may bring.


It doesn't really matter if our children remember who we were for what good does it bring you when you won't be alive to feel the gratitude of being remembered in the first place. Moreover, a little recognition and remembrance is truthfully to be expected and maybe even deserved but at the end of the day it is their lives that they will live not yours.


This leads me to legacy and preservation. To what end does the desire to be remembered and making a mark in the world serve you. I am not talking about people that make it by following their passion but of the people whose work is driven by the intention of being heard. Of course all this falls obsolete when the person is truly selfless to tire away their lives just for their work to live on, to better the next generation but how many of us in actuality are genuinely selfless to that extent? 


Yet the decisions of the past, the inventions by people who are no more, make what the world is today. The world we now know would not have existed if none had taken the effort to advance humanity. Both you and I are impacted by history more than we would like to acknowledge, the reason for that being caused by the continuity of events dimming the significance of anything that is enhanced because we are simply born into it and develop alongside it. So, how much am I to be indebted to the past? Should gratitude be an obligatory aspect in our lives? Or must we simply live in the world we were born in, with the past unexamined? The need to question our feelings toward the events that led to our existence is perhaps the most human, and most questions will be left unanswered.


To answer the initial question, I believe a life without memories cannot be a life well lived. Unfortunately, like most aspects of human life this area too, seems to be grey. If memories are the foundation of one's sentience, then they also shape how meaning itself is constructed. Perhaps the purpose of life is not to be remembered, nor to remember everything, but to experience moments deeply enough that they alter us while we are here. Whether or not those moments endure beyond us may be irrelevant.


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