1/ An interesting benefit of having written journals going back to 1979 (When I started keeping them at age 19) is a constant reminder of how it is a feature, not a bug, of our memories to automatically augment (read change) them to make them consistent with current conditions
2/ and for that process to be completely outside of our conscious awareness. Our brains are *designed* to make "hindsight bias" a constant demon of evolution's design. I speculate this is so in order to give us a constant "illusion of control" and allow us to see both the world
3/ and our life as a constant, consistent narrative that makes sense. What sparked this was my pulling out all of my old journals and going through them where I was struck by the generally accepted narrative that the country has never been as polarized as it is now in 2020.
4/ Well, my journal from 1980 calls bullshit on this idea. It's weird to read in your own handwriting lamentations of a highly fragmented, disunited and disgruntled nation that might be "on the verge of another civil war" which is what 20-year old Jim wrote in 1980. I was
5/ honestly shocked at this commentary as 60-year old Jim if asked prior to reading the old journals would have said that period was "the good old days" and actually believed it.
The lesson appears to be--the "good old days" weren't. Nostalgia is an amalgamation of our
The lesson appears to be--the "good old days" weren't. Nostalgia is an amalgamation of our
6/ minds "remembering" things a lot more informed by how we would have liked things to be rather than how they actually were. Probably another reason why we put so much more faith in things that we saw "with our own eyes" than in other's experiences. Yet, this trip down
7/ memory lane gives evidence that our memory is a highly unreliable narrator quite given to major rewrites and deletions that we're not even consciously aware of--yet another powerful reason to document our thoughts of the moment *during* the moment. Lots of lessons here.
