Total (AutoBio) Recall
and Other Ways the Second-of-the-Day Project Hacked My Brain
Reflect for a moment on your 2014. What comes to mind? An exotic vacation? Moving into a new place? A good friend’s wedding? Chances are a few special events immediately come to the forefront. Not surprising. These events and others serve as temporal landmarks that help us better connect to our past, allow us to structure our future, and motivate us in the present.
But what happens to the rest of the year? The forgotten moments that make up the vast desert on the road trip between temporal landmarks — hours lost at the café, behind your office desk, or binge watching on your couch? Recurrent, ordinary events like these retreat into the deep recesses of the mind and are rarely heard or seen again. You maintain sense that these events happened over a period of time, but specificities blur together to form a shapeless, amalgamated feeling about that period in your life (“yeah, sounds like something I would have done in 2000…ish”). It’s arguably important that these commonplace events happened — afterall, it’s not just about the destination, it’s the journey, right?
What I’m getting at here is that memory — specifically, autobiographical recall — is anything but absolute. Autobiographical recall is relative to the perceived significance of events taking place. Let’s say your landmark-worthy vacation of last year lasted 8 days. That’s just 2.2% of the 365 days that comprised 2014. Yet looking back, this event may feel much, much greater than “just 2.2%” of the year (or any self-demarcated era for that matter). And, increasingly so as we age! Off the top of my head, I cannot tell you more than a handful of events that happened in 2010, but my god, that one day (0.27%) on top of Machu Picchu as the clouds lifted off the mountaintops at sunrise can feel like 70% of that year.
Embarking on a second-of-the-day project for 2014, there wasn’t just one stand-alone reason for doing it. It wasn’t a groundbreaking idea, there’s been an app for years (which in all honesty, would have been way easier than the way I went about it). I just envisioned it would be a cool digital souvenir to have once finished. So I never imagined the number of repercussions that would come from being dedicated to a splice-of-life vlogging continuum like this. This journey took the passive comfort of natural autobiographical recall processing and threw it out the window as I quickly realized I was in for an unrelenting year that forced me to approach each day linearly and absolutely. I’ll attempt to explain now with some things in a list.
1. Just several days in, it felt like my memory was on steroids. I wasn’t just filming a few seconds at random every day. I found myself always paying attention, hyper-aware of my surroundings and instinctively ready to quickdraw my iPhone 5s in order to capture the perfect moment that would truly “capture the spirit of the day” in cinematic fashion. Every other week or so, I’d take 10–20 minutes to sort through the timestamped footage and place the seconds in order in Adobe Premiere. Not only did I live out these events firsthand, but I’m rewatching key moments of each day multiple times. I was inadvertently familiarizing and studying the timeline of each day. Each finalized, selected second chosen for the video became a trigger for my recall — I knew what events led up to that moment, what happened after, who was there, why we were there, and every detail in between. It became a pretty cool party trick, if you’re into that sort of thing. I could feel my brain approaching 100%.
2. It’s impossible to capture “that perfect moment” each day. Like I mentioned, I was always filming extra in case something happened — I amassed 73.4 gigs(!) of 1080p footage over the course of the year. Apologies in advance for the extreme cliché that’s about to follow, but that perfect moment really was like a snowflake: each one unique, impossible to replicable; by the time I realized that moment was unfolding in front of me, it was already gone. And often inserting myself into that very moment to capture it (touching the snowflake, if you will), would melt it away. The moment had passed. Or, it’s just not the same when, “hey, are you filming?” outright ruins the moment. The final video is most definitely a collection of second-bests, at best. I mean that’s kind of an accurate representation of how life plays out anyway. But as a whole, it is what it is, and that’s exactly what it’s supposed to be.
3. We have countless routines beyond our control — but it just takes a tiny deviation from the norm to make the day memorable. If you asked me before this project, I would have probably said something dumb like I was a person with fewer than average routines: my job is a unpredictable, I travel often and I never seem to make social/recreational plans — things just happen. Well, bullshit. I don’t care who you are or what you do, you have a myriad of routine happenings you are subjected to day in and day out. But what amazed me was how willingly we all go through with the same work-home-sleep song and dance each day, and how easy it was to go a little out of my way to see that new free gallery exhibition, or actually follow-up on that new lunch-spot I had been meaning to try. Doing something a little different on my commute home or elsewhere made me feel disproportionally more accomplished than I arguably should have felt at the end of the day. Free good vibes? I’ll take it.
The project was fun and all, but the perfectionist in me made it into an exhaustive enough task that I don’t want to give it another go any time soon (maybe in 5 years..?) — but I’m beyond satisfied with the end result. Highly recommended, YMMV, etc.
One omni-observation to wrap this up. Life is chock-full of sensory events we are experiencing at the speed of light and we’ll never be able to replicate any of these things ever again — so enjoy them. The little things, man. I’m on the same route home, the same who/what/where/when/why as any other day, and yet, these sensory experiences all around me are entirely unique. Irreplicable.* That is, if you look close enough. All the temporal landmarks and deserts in between that aren’t easily captured — there’s something to the greater journey to be appreciated if you look closely enough. And that’s life I guess. No re-dos, just second-best replays.
*Irreplicable isn’t a word, which is fitting. I’m guessing because it was already used somewhere once, and therefore can’t be used again.
