Do you remember what you were doing at 1 pm on 12th of march, 2025? I would wager that the answer is no. Perhaps the 12th was a special day to you, and you do remember, perhaps you don’t actively recall it but you can look back at your calendar, planner or flip through a diary to find the entry you wrote that day. On initial consideration your memory may have failed you, but the additional context of your personal record may push you in the right direction and lead you to approximate what you were doing back then.

At some stages of our life this approximation game is easy – students would likely be at school, full time workers at work. Perhaps you always volunteer on Wednesdays, or you’re attending language learning class. It might be the day you have sports practice, or the night you always see your group of friends. Wednesdays don’t hold any inherent external structure for me. Fear not though, there is always a calendar I can look back at.

That Wednesday I woke up late, did some work in the morning and attended classes in the afternoon. Presumably at some point I got some groceries, had dinner, and spent my time in some way that was productive but not as productive as I would have liked. The day ended at some reasonable time, around 10 or 11 pm.

The first fact is not inferred from the day itself, rather the fact that I had apparently planned to go out on Tuesday. The last fact is equally not evident from that day on its own, but when considering the fact that I had an appointment at 9 am, I figured that is the most likely thing. This entry is sparse and I’m drawing conclusions with little information.

If you were to ask me what I was doing on the 12th of march in 2011, I would have no idea. No record of that exist, the records of my digital calendar extend back a few years, my diaries only go back a year. I have fallen into the habit of ritually destroying them when the urge strikes.

When you think about life, what we do in our days is what comprises our lives. Nonetheless, we often remember extraordinarily little from our days. It would be impossible to remember all our days in their entirety. I think most people would like to remember them though, and people do all sorts of things in an attempt to keep these memories.

Memory keeping journals, photography, (video) diaries, none of it is particularly new. What is new, is the ease with which we can preserve and capture our lives. Beside some minor practical inconveniences and the cost barrier of a few cameras, there’s little to prevent you from capturing your entire life, constantly. You can have a complete record of your day, in a way that would have been unimaginable a century ago.

I don’t particularly like video, hence I settled for a much more traditional way of capturing my life or keeping my memories. I wrote a diary. Initially, the goal of writing a diary was to have this record I could look back on. Hence, it was intentionally written as though I was writing to some other, future version of myself. It was written with context that I have indeed long since forgotten and with idle questions to the prospective reader. As I got older and changed, so did my diary practice.

At some point, I realised that most of my life would be lost forever. I found this unbearable.

By lost I mean that no matter what we do – the present is a transitory state in which we find ourselves. The very nature of the present is that it passes every single moment, we can never return to it. A memory devolves into a recollection of a recollection of a recollection, the distance between the moment and its remembrance grows each time we remember it. Photos suffer from their strength; they are clouded by perspective. Filming your daily life is the closest we can come, but even then, your inner monologue at that moment is lost. Not to mention the decision to film your life inherently warps your life. You can capture a life on film, but not your life.

Instead of accepting this fact of life – I fought against it by compulsive writing and record-keeping. I don’t fully believe there was a single moment where I honestly believed I could fight against this by writing things down, rather it was a way to make life just a little more bearable again. I convinced myself that if I wrote things down then an external record would exist, hence the reality of my life could be confirmed. The more time I spent writing, the more time I spent worrying about writing. It consumed me, completely.

Of course, it wasn’t only this fact. Circumstances encouraged this wild inflamed passion to capture my life. There were so many things going on and so many of them were surreal and capricious, my entire life felt like a house of cards and I was under the impression that the act of painting it would prevent it from collapsing by sheer force of will. I had the primordial urge to prove that I existed, that my life was real, that it happened.

The house of cards collapsed. In the moment I craved a look into my own past most, when I needed guidance, I had opened my planners and journals only to find lacklustre entries, if they existed at all. In this moment of crisis, I couldn’t find any guidance from the past, as if it had never existed at all.

Since then, I still record keep, I have a five-year diary that I enjoy writing down a few lines in each day. I’m learning to appreciate the power of forgetting and the organic way our memory works. I’d rather not know what I was doing the 12th of march this year. The pain of forgetting is much softer than the pain of spending your life reliving it.

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P.S. If you enjoyed this subject matter I would highly recommend reading ‘Library of Illusions’ by Junji Ito.