You Were There

Someone asks you what 2019 was like.

You know the facts. The flat, the job, how old you were. You know them the way you know the capital of Portugal, as things you hold rather than as a place you can return to. You have four thousand photographs from that year and you have looked at almost none of them since the week they were taken.

The honest answer is that you do not know what 2019 was like. You were there for every day of it. You cannot get back into any of them.

Most people discover this by accident and quietly assume something is wrong with them. It is one of the most common experiences of modern adult life and one of the least discussed, and the frame almost everybody reaches for is the wrong one.

Memory is not what experience leaves behind. It is a second process with its own requirements, and there are five of them. Attention while something is happening. Difference from the days around it. An empty interval afterwards in which the brain replays it. A retelling. And a landmark to hang it on.

Every one of those five has been quietly traded away for something that was, at the time, worth having. Attention for access. Difference for smoothness. The empty interval for something to listen to. The retelling for an archive that holds it better than you do. And the landmarks went with the transitions, because careers now change without anyone moving desk.

The result is not that you forgot your life. Large parts of it were never laid down as anything retrievable in the first place.

You Were There explains what happened, without a villain and without nostalgia, and then sets out what can be done about it. Not total recall, which is neither available nor desirable. Something smaller and more useful. A change in how much of a year survives it, built from interventions that take ninety seconds.

For anyone who has looked at a decade of their own life and found a texture where the days should be.