5 Jan 2025
How / Why should I document my life?
Journaling, mindfulness, mood scarves, photo albums, digital picture frames, gratefulness jars etc. The ways that we can store information about ourselves today are seemingly endless. As I´m writing this in early January of 2025, I should really be tending to my “yearly archiving”. But as always there are too many ways to do this, and I start to doubt if my method is the right one. So, to find a better way to go about things, or at least to alleviate my doubts about my method, I think we need to look more closely at the matter.
999 images per day
It is cliché to say that a picture says more than a than a thousand words, but images are a good place to start when discussing what we should add to life´s filing cabinet. The question is, how many do we need, and what should they be of?
Looking into the classic family photo albums of say 20-25 years ago, we see pictures of the exceptional times. Baby´s first bath, birthdays, vacations, new car purchases etc. This makes sense, most people didn´t carry a camera full time, especially during the film era where there only were a handful 35mm cameras that were truly pocketable. Images also cost multiple orders of magnitude more to take and develop back then, so taking pictures of routine and regular things to many must have felt wasteful.
Looking at the above statement, one could argue that this paints an incomplete, bordering on dishonest picture of life. I know that I used to think that way as a teenager. In a way, we are much better at capturing our “real” lives compared to the film camera days, now that we carry smartphones, carelessly snapping pictures of timetables, wardrobe tags, part numbers etc.
The problem with comparing our newer, less focused imaging habits, with our more restrained photography habits of yesterdecade, is that the perceived value of images seems similar to wine. Their value increase with age, rarity and whether they come from southern France or not. Of course it is therefore hard to compare the value of your 200+ bathroom selfies from yesterday to a dozen 30 year old pictures from a summer vacation in Cap d´Agde. The potential quality of documenting a “truer” version of our lives will be discussed in the following sections, but personally I have never felt that our family photo albums were too short, and yet they usually only contain a few hundred photos.
Imagine looking through the years 2022-2024 in a few decades. That´s quite a short period, yet in my case that would entail looking through over 4000 pictures, which would take almost 6 hours if I were to look at each picture for 5 seconds. And I don´t think I take more pictures than an average person. Apply this to an entire lifetime, and it seems like an archive of 100 000 pictures sounds more like a burden than an asset.
on the other hand, there is also value in the mundane photographs and videos. An old picture of your apartment could remind you of your old stuff, the parties that took place in that small space, the good times, the struggles etc. A short video snippet of normal life could remind you of forgotten routines, and bring back voices and presences of people who are no longer in your life. The virtues of documenting the mundane is discussed with immense passion by a long time favourite of mine, Kliksphilip, in THIS video, and he does make a good point. There is value to documenting routine, and regular things we barely notice changing over time.
The problem this causes is of course, that it leaves a lot for us to document. And as mentioned above, the though of looking through a camera roll with hundreds of pictures taken each week, for the entirity of our 28 000 day lives, feels like an almost impossible task. Maybe there is a fine line that gives us a valuable representation of life, without creating petabytes worth of data. However, is trying to acheive this compromise even worth the effort, and will my documentation attempts even matter?
Does your documentation matter?
It is fair to ask yourself who you are doing this documentation for. The value for oneself is clear to a lot of people, so documenting for your own sake is a good start. Of course, to a certain extent, there is value to the people close to you in life, such as vacation pictures that can be shown to curious friends and relatives. And even though the parents might not see it as important, there is a certain responsability imposed on parents of documenting the early years of their childrens lives. These childhood images usually treasured once the children become adults, and children have quite limited means to themselves document their lives.
Whether your documentation matters to a larger audience than people close to you in time close to your own lifetime, depends mostly on one question: Will you be remebered in history? Are you very influential? And the answer to this question is most likely no. And that it okay. The vast majority of people throughout history have more or less been completely been forgotten about. In our society, where making a lasting impact and legacy are so highly valued, the above statement could be seen as overly pessimistic and bordering on insulting. Yet the fact of remains.
With the exception of a few great thinkers, artists, criminals etc. whose every word are studied extensively either during or long after their lifetime, most people are just not that interesting. It might sound bleak, bu to me it´s almost comforting to think about how little people actually care, as we all are too busy with our own life to give other people much thought, especially those who no longer walk this earth. At least for me this leaves some room to breathe, knowing the only person scrutinizing my life is me. The occasional genealogist decendant might of course find a thourough documentation of your life interesting and valuable, but considering how little many people seem to care about their elders and ancestry, I wouldn´t put to much hope on the children of your grandchildren ever caring very much about your archive.
Most likely, no one will care about your documentation of your life in the long run. And should we even expect more?
One must first get over the idea that the time span between the last caveman and the first Greek philosophers was short. The absence of any history for this period sometimes gives this illusion. But before the Greek philosophers arrived on the scene, for a period of at least five times all our recorded history since the Greek philosophers, there existed civilizations in an advanced state of development. They had villages and cities, vehicles, houses, marketplaces, bounded fields, agricultural implements and domestic animals, and led a life quite as rich and varied as that in most rural areas of the world today. And like people in those areas today they saw no reason to write it all down, or if they did, they wrote it on materials that have never been found. Thus we know nothing about them. The “Dark Ages” were merely the resumption of a natural way of life that had been momentarily interrupted by the Greeks.
Robert Pirsig, “Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”
The above quote is actually part of a much longer reasoning about quality and it´s connection to the Greek areté and Indian dharma respectively, in a book full of philisophy way over my pay grade. But what´s interesting for us here, is that Pirsig suggests that our efforts to document and be remembered into the afterlife might in fact not be the default state of man, and that fullfilling lives probably existed during hisotrical perios where people didn´t bother to care about legacy.
Knowing that our documenting will mostly be for ourselves, we can look into whether we should focus on being representative when documenting, or focus on highlights like in old photo albums. With the pressure of caring about what the afterworld will think off our shoulders(because likely no one will care), it mostly becomes a question of personal preference. One could document the highlights to remind oneself of good times in the past, and maybe share this with family and friends. Or try documenting accurately, as a way to remeber correctly and mitigate the way the human brain forgets, twists and invents memories. Who knows, you might be remembered anyways, like the lousy copper merchant Ea-Nasir…
A case for AI?
I am aware that I might come off as a bit of a technophobe on this blog. After all, it was created partially as a response to how the internet is changing, largely due to AI. And while I usually object to AI being arbitrarilly being put into everything, helping us document and remember is something it might be good at. In fact it already is.
A feature present in many cloud photo services such as Google photos helps making something useful out of our massive photo libraries. Once every few days, it automatically selects a dozen photos, and notifies the user of it. Sometimes to commemmorate a series of photos taken a certain time ago, all taken on the same day, or using gps to determine that a series of photos are from a trip. Sometimes it shows a curated collection of images of a certain person, pet or activity. Either way, it urges us to occasionally open a page in our obese digital photo album, while filtering out random screenshots, pictures of part numbers at the hardware store etc.
In the future, similar features might be available to those who journal, bringing out relevant notes, thoughts and memories intelligently from time to time. It might even know what you are thinking about without you having to journal. Maybe robots will knit your mood scarves and fill your gratefullness jars for you. I´ll leave the discussion about the integrity nightmare this entails for another time, I´m trying to be positive here!
As I´m finishing this post up I realise that I have managed to write many words and not really come to any conclusions. It´s more of a rambling than a guide, but if you are to take anything from this, try to add a little bit of the mundane everyday to your life archive. This makes slow changes in our life clear while emphasizing the passing of time, a process which can be hard to notice without references.