The summer before covid I was in a public park campaigning for Bernie. The vast majority of interactions we had were positive. Anyway, some chunky white Gen Xer came up to me while he was sucking down a vanilla ice cream cone and started ranting about how he was a chemist and climate change was fake. I remembered something Bill Nye said once, and asked this guy why Venus was hotter than Mercury, despite Venus being farther from the sun. (Answer: a shitload of C02 in the atmosphere.) The guy could not answer and soon left. The question clearly bothered him a great deal.
Obviously you have to take my word for all of this. I know it's also oozing with liberalism, but I mended many of my evil ways the following summer.
I sometimes wonder about the memory of people who are political, but have all their opinions shift in step with the media. Know an Economist reader type guy who a year ago was balls to the wall warhawk on Ukraine and NATO, regardless of nukes, etc. Now regularly explaining how it would be stupid to push a nuclear power against the wall as if it was always his stance. And if I call him out on it, or other stuff, he gets a 'dog trying to figure out where his human went' look. And it's not just him, i know a lot of people like that. Meanwhile, I'm randomly keeping myself up at night because I misgendered someone 5 years ago.
It's hard for me to comprehend. I used to think that they were lying out of shame, but I don't even see a flicker of recognition when I mention something they've memory-holed. I'm pretty convinced at this point that a lot of them couldn't get access to their own memory-holes even if they wanted to try
I'm middle aged now and I really do think that the vast majority of people just have shit memory. Whether or not that's due to the stress of Capitalism or human limits, idk. But, I've noticed that over the years I remember a lot of details that people find unsettling and i've heard almost all my friends' stories multiple times and they will happily tell them as if we've just met. Some of them I was there for.😅
You're probably right. Memory's a nebulous enough thing when it's working at its peak, and every kind of stress seems to detract from it. I'm not 30 yet and I pull a
in the middle of a solid third of the things I say. Maybe it's not such a mystery
I seem to only have a good memory for conversations that caused me discomfort, which seems like the opposite of many people
I've always wondered about this. Is it just a matter of what people pay attention to? Like, they don't pay attention to who they tell which story, so they just don't remember? Or do some people just have better memory? The latter seems kinda disturbing...
We're creatures of habit and we love walking down that worn path. This becomes very apparent as we get older. I spent time doing the caregiver thing around elderly people for a few years and it was very much like groundhog day.