So, having basked in a recent article from Steve Conway (here) that basically went on about how in touch with tomorrow I am, I thought I’d best mention the cost of my childlike excitement with today and the future. Yes, it comes at a cost.
Well, to me it doesn’t come at a cost, because what I know is all I know, I’ve never experienced anything else, never known anything else. It’s my normality.
Ok, this is how it works: I have a very limited long term memory except for certain aspects of certain major events. And music, I can remember music. Roughly speaking I have a memory that goes back about 10 years from whenever ‘now’ is. That means that, roughly speaking, anything that happened in my life before 2002 gets into either a haze, a muddle, or just isn’t there. I can re-train myself to keep recalling and, I guess, re-writing into my brain, certain events or certain people, and there are some events and people that seem to always be there, but all the rest just isn’t. It’s gone.
This seems to be in stark contrast to most people of my age who are stuck replaying events of 30 or 40 years ago in their head, but haven’t got a clue what happened yesterday. Huh. Were I to try to look back at 30 years ago, 1982, I’d be mainly lost if attempting to remember anything about events from that year. I can, mainly by calculation, tell you where I lived, and give some vague descriptions of maybe 2 or 3 people I knew back then. But I will recall a lot of the music from that year, strangely, and usually with absolute horror, because it won’t bloody well go away. I’m sure this compounds my pathological hatred of oldies.
One thing it probably does do is explain why my mind is receptive to tomorrow’s technology today, as highlighted by Steve Conway (whoever he is [Joking]). I have to struggle hard to remember old school ways of doing things, but excitedly look at what’s available now and coming up and try to work out how people will respond to what’s available. I suspect that having no prejudices from the past is what gives teenagers that freedom to enjoy what’s happening here and now, and this is why I’m very much like them when it comes to lacking maturity.
Conversations with people my age are almost impossible. More so if they have known me for a few decades. They will constantly recycle words or phrases from my peer group from, say, 40 years ago, roll around with laughter, whilst I sit there having absolutely no idea what’s going on. And, yes, it’s true, things from 40 years ago just aren’t funny, ok? I find myself having to ask for explanations, and the explanations leave me with those, ‘had to be there’ feelings. Ok, I was there, but I just don’t remember being there. Meanwhile, I will talk about today and tomorrow. I will anorak on about current and new things like I’m a teenager, so we really have no common ground. In fact, I identify far more with people around a third of my age than I do with people my actual age. I can engage in actual conversations with them. But not the older folk.
When Facebook came along I used it for memory re-training. I started to hook up with, well ‘Friend’, people I once knew. Sometimes I couldn’t remember knowing them, but since people on Facebook obligingly share their life stories with the world, I was able to re-fresh and re-train my brain, and to re-put into my past these people. Again, of course via Facebook they’d be mentioning catchphases or events that we’d shared in real life, and I wouldn’t have a clue what they were going on about. But, I pretended I did so as not to offend.
I find that by stalking people via Facebook I can keep refreshing fading memories about who they once were to me, but even going through my relatively modest collection of ‘Friends’ I am at a loss as to who the majority actually are. Mind you, that might not just be an issue I suffer from!
I think I only really became aware of only having a 10 year span of long term memory in the mid 1990s, and I’m pretty sure it hasn’t decreased (or increased) in length. I guess a worry (for me) might be if it gets smaller. Only having a short term memory must be weird. But to me, not as weird as only having a long term memory and being stuck in the Groundhog Day it must bring with it.
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