It's a very frustrating feeling when one moment you catch a sensible thought stream, ready to develop it and bring into reality, only for it to disappear for reasons that you're not privy to understand, at least not from your ordinary mind.
I think being forgetful creatures is one of the biggest Ls we have as conscious beings attempting to navigate a complex shifting reality.
It's a big loss because it reinforces the ephemeral nature of our own fleeting consciousness and our sense of incompleteness.
Only out-of-the-ordinary experiences (good or bad) are retained from the constant torrent of daily existence.
All the rest just disappears seemingly into oblivion unless something triggers a specific neural pathway to resurface a fragmented replay of an experience.
I know I'm sounding here like this isn't a good thing.
Somehow, losses are associated with a deficit where something is subtracted, which means a negative sign is generated.
Personally, I'm more concerned with the hidden algebra of gain that accompanies every perceived loss.
I think there's always an element of balance with the fundamental mechanics of existence.
You lose something to gain something and vice versa.
In this case, perhaps the positive sign generated is the ability to be self-aware.
As paradoxical as it may sound, you're aware of yourself because you can forget yourself. If you couldn't forget yourself, then there probably wouldn't be any need for the active construction of 'self', since there would be no contrast against which to define presence.
On a theological plane, it is said that the proverbial Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge, and the Elohim uttered "Behold, the man is become as one of us!" (or something along those lines).
This act, usually framed as a fall, is also an awakening in my view because it marked a transition from forgetting due to pure innocence in exchange for individual consciousness.
I've read historical accounts that mentioned there was another tree in this Eden, and that access to the Tree of Life was then barred, lest they also live forever in their newfound, dualistic state.
From a purely design pov, my mind wonders on the implied intention behind this deliberate limitation and what purpose it serves in the cosmic scheme.
I think also an unbounded existence could have become a burden without the counterpoint of finitude.
Without the finite, moments will lose their urgency and the impetus to create, learn, prioritize, love, etc., stems from the knowledge that our time and energy are limited.
Now back to the current era, it's well known that our individual attention span is plummeting down the digital drain.
This newer type of forgetfulness, however, feels less like a natural trade-off for self-awareness and more so a curated erosion.
We offload our memories to external devices, which fragments our capacity for deep recall, delegate our opinions to algorithmic feeds, which then funnel our perspectives to social media echo chambers.
No wonder the frustration of a fleeting thought stream is amplified within a system that actively discourages sustained internal processing.
Systems within a system.
Now we have both the ancient limitation of forgetfulness and a modern, engineered forgetfulness.
The latter could well be designed to capture and commodify the former.
Thanks for reading!! Share your thoughts below on the comments.
