A friend Of mine, Gabz has been going backwards and forwards on where to host his blog. He tried Ghost for a bit, but went back to micro.blog mainly because of a feature he likes called “on this day”. Much like some features on social media, it surfaces posts from the current date one year ago, meaning you can see what you were posting. This gave me pause for thought.

Not on his blog, it's wonderful, but the desire to look back. It is human nature to lean on our memories. They made sure we didn’t go to the dangerous places, knew what a predator looked like, and allowed us to flourish as a species. Learning and growing from our memories is a fundamental building block of success in every area of life. Yet, I am not convinced we need to do so much of it now.

Due to digital technology, almost every area of our memories are being offloaded to the web. Each image permanent, each post saved and in some cases brought back to life every so often. I take photos of my kids and life things all the time, yet have a mentality to hardly ever look back. My personality is fixated on living in the present and looking forward — but some people find looking back important.

I get a lot of benefit of offloading my mental load to other means. Even this blog is my place to think out loud and work though my thoughts to conclusion. Linking back to old posts that have supporting ideas or often changes in attitude are essential for my personal improvement. Clearly there is a massive benefit to looking at the improvements that have happened and the journey you have made through life, I am just not convinced it needs to be so fixed.

Don’t our memories need to be a bit fluffy and malleable? Would life be better if we didn’t remember so much. Just the bits and pieces we need to, in a way that suits us. Can growing and learning still happen if we can’t move away from mistakes and events that have happened?

These are all questions I have not answered yet. I am sure there will be a time when I will be thankful that my past self took so many pictures of life events. They might be the only thing to stir the memories from their sleeping place in my brain. My interest is how different we as people can be when it comes to our memories and the things we value most.