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In the future this will be a period of time I'll remember clearly, which makes it valuable. Easy times lead to no substantial memories which is effectively the loss of that time.
This is how I interact with my dad’s dog.
Dad’s out of town so I’m staying at his house taking care of his dog. I love this dog. But also take this dog for granted a lot, especially when I’ve just come home from work and I’m irritable and overwhelmed.
I pretend that, instead of this being me here and now, it’s a future version of me, from maybe thirty years in the future, when this dog has been long dead. Then I imagine that this moment is some kind of miracle wormhole through time where the me from the time this dog is an ancient memory has been given a few minutes to be with the dog.
Like, I would happily trade my finger and all the money I have for a minute with my mother, who died fifteen years ago. But I can’t.
What I can do is treat the people around me as I would treat my mother in that one minute, if it were somehow granted to me.
Almost like opening myself up to visitation from my future self. And in doing so, I experience more richly and it will actually work. When the dog is long gone, in the ground for decades, I will be able to visit him because I opened myself, which led to deep memory inscription.
Brilliant post, and I try to do the same thing, if I'm somewhere beautiful or profound and I have a few minutes to myself I like to make a "memory bubble" to me it's like a little snapshot of experience that I work really hard to recall every minute detail ( including my emotional state and sounds and smells, etc..) and then I can revisit them in the future.
I like this because it makes you appreciate where you are at the time more, and gives you good memories to lean on in the future.
Incidentally, I think this phenomenon of appreciating the present by looking through the lens of a future where it’s lost, is the basis of the band name The Grateful Dead.
This seems wrong
I'm open to discussion, but now that I've existed for a substantial period of time, I've found that my most prevailing memories are the ones hard won (e.g. when I almost had to sleep on the streets or ran out of money in a foreign country or got evicted from my flat). Whereas days sat on my couch watching telly, or in the pub having fun with friends, or another routine day in the gym are all blurred memories with no definition and no real sense of elapsed time.