242 - remember? 🗣️🧠
Hey there, ! A piece from the drafts that never really got polished, had a quick squiz and re-edit which hopefully will make SOME sort of sense - the sacrifices of busy work life at the moment.
Please enjoy :)
1.
War, what is it good for?
I went to a slightly disappointing* talk by Shehan Karunatilaka (who wrote The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida) for the Melbourne Writer's Festival last year, and latched on to something he mentioned as part of his panel. *(note: he was great, the interviewer was bad).
The book is about the trials and tribulations of Maali Almeida, a ghost war photographer who has stashed some spicy photos, and has seven moons to solve his own death and reveal the ugly side of war. It's a funny, dark novel that drips with magical realism and Sri Lankan mythology - if anyone remembers, it was a recommend a while back!
But as a backdrop to this quest, Sri Lanka's civil war rages. There are multiple parties battling and vying for power, wheeling and dealing with civilian lives, terrorist conflicts every other day, many just trying to survive as they can. There are some harrowing descriptions of the small gods and monsters that inhabit the Sri Lankan ghost world - and the horrors they were birthed from.
Anyway, one of the things that Shehan mentioned was that criticism of his book mainly came from Sri Lankans who wanted to forget about the horrors of the civil war and move on, so that everyone could heal. A classic sweep it under the rug kinda move (typical Asian society, right?). He, however, felt that though these past events were relatively recent, they were still worth writing about to have people confront those horrors and come to terms with a country's sins.
And what I was most interested in was - how could people forget something so fundamentally scarring? Why would they want to forget?!
2.
How could I forget?
Well for starters, the forgetting curve is something you learn about it in Psych 101 (or at least, those warm afternoons where I sleepily learned Units 1/2 in Psychology) - Ebbinghaus ran a number of (limited) experiments in the 1880's that hypothesised how memory degrades over time in an individual, and helped to kickstart a whole generation that's now got us to spaced repetition techniques and mind palaces.
What you learn from this is that if you keep reviewing the material you're trying to remember, it gets easier to recall:
Bottom line: the more you're reminded, the better you remember things!
But what I observed is that for things we probably should be remembering, or making sure we don't forget...we never review or remember. Things flash by so quickly that I can't even find an Instagram Reel I looked at 3 hours ago because it's been flushed down the Internet toilet like that.
And if I can't remember that, how is society supposed to keep hold of something in their minds?!
3.
Didn't we do this already?
I kept noticing that there were just...things that kept happening, that I felt like we should know how to solve, but couldn't do anything about:
- Quarantine procedures and best practice from a global pandemic - was it something we had to learn about anew through COVID-19? Things had changed, but how come there wasn't a...well...handbook on what worked last time? I felt like we had forgotten, and had to re-learn a lot of those behaviours
- The global financial crisis - which...seems to be happening again? Why is it that there was this whole crisis about being responsible and accountable for spending, but instead there's still rampant capital being pumped into ideas and markets that definitely shouldn't have them? We still haven't worked out how to combat inflation?! Sure, it's died down a bit now, but I feel like the cost of living just...became something we all go 'yeah okay, sure, why not, that's how the cookie crumbles'?
- The fact that Maccas ice creams used to be 20c - like surely I'm not the only person to remember this?!?
I get that for a lot of these things, we've learnt the big lessons (i.e. the basic quarantine procedures, putting bans on certain financial instruments, and that soft serves aren't that great anyway unless in a McFlurry), but with new lessons they don't seem to stick as well as they should.
4.
Why do I need to care about this?
Where I got to was: there are so many things that inundate us with information, whether real or fake, that I don't think we have any space to actually capture and hold in our minds for a long period of time - the cup is being overfilled and things are spilling out. And this isn't just all of us individually developing fractured attention spans, but as a collective society as well.
Memes (in this way meaning 'the shared things we all know about') seem to be so niche and unconnected from each other, that though we have this wide, vast internet we can look at all the time, they're ephemeral and pass by within the space of a week or two...or maybe even days! I have a piece that I'm still mulling on how to write, but I have a feeling that the half-life of memes is so short these days; the 15 minutes of fame that people experience is shortening RAPIDLY to 15 seconds!
Instead, we're moving towards the next dopamine hits of memery - layers upon layers of calcified memes that if you blink, you'll miss, and suddenly your friend is posting racoons with clipart as a meme on Instagram and you're kind of like 'what did I miss?!'
And the only way to get traction, to get back into the minds of people, is to get more outrageous or more polarised; no-one has time for nuance or understanding. This is perhaps mostly being shown in American news, but it's probably part of your daily internet content as well.
There's just so many things people want you to care about, and to think about, and to work out...and though I appreciate what Shehan was doing with the Sri Lankan civil war (and others who cover all other atrocities that are occurring in the world), I also understand why people move on. There's just too much stuff, and it's tiring to think about the hard things, even if we really should.
Honestly, the answer to this is just 'hey, history is really important to analyse and learn lessons from so PAY ATTENTION' - which, okay, I guess so.
I just wish there was a way to make sure people just...did the right thing. Learned the right lessons. Kept it ready for when it was going to happen again, and really thought about what they were doing.
Or...I dunno...maybe we should just do some pandemic drills every couple of years.
I could use another pandemic to really hone my baking skills.
Chat soon :)
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✔️Real Life Recommendations
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Sideways - I wanted to watch this before watching The Holdovers, because it features the same director (Alexander Payne) and lead actor (Paul Giamatti). In this one, two middle-aged dudes go on a last hurrah before one of them gets married. They've both had success and failures (more of the latter) and that provides some great tension to the movie. It's well-written, I think, and hits a bit close to home as I get older. Has some great performances from a young Sandra Oh and Thomas Haden Church - but more importantly, it apparently sparked an American downturn of merlot (the wine) because the main character had a bit of a monologue about how shit it was. Highly recommended for slow watching and coming to terms with life.
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Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 - it's taken us ages but we've finally finished it. What a RUSH what a great follow-up to the first Pandemic Legacy game, and a subtle but great way to incorporate the story of the first season into the second one. A lot of really cool new changes, making it more personal, making it more tense, making it more strategic and important to get shit done; and ALWAYS ratcheting up the tension in the most perfect ways. Next stop - Season 0! Highly recommended for the boardgamers out there :D
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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Dani Ortiz - Penn and Teller FOOL US - I went down a magic rabbit hole and found Dani Ortiz who had such a WONDERFUL routine on Fool Us!. I absolutely loved the misdirection and the reveals / prestige. FANTASTIC - please watch this routine if nothing else on this list!
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Facts 1 - You are what you love - I don't know why, but this piece was just so to the point, and had such a clear way of explaining their view. Go and do things with your whole self - don't try to compartmentalise.
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Making a pdf bigger than Germany - people do the coolest, weirdest stuff. In this one, making a pdf that goes all the way to the Moon!