How to Remember Your Life

Today's fresh YouTube hunt is a YouTuber, Johnny Harris, a journalist and filmmaker. His video about learning piqued my interest. I started digging into other videos — one particular video connected with me: How to remember your life.

We all make nostalgia trips. I want to know what I was doing, this day, five years ago. But it is tough to jog your memory that far. Even though we have tons of tools to store photos and video, it is not easy.

Johnny Harris also faced the same problem, and his solution to this problem is one fundamental principle:

Key to remember life is to delete photos (Yes, you read it right. DELETE)

How do you document the place to retrieve the memories easily?

• Take a bunch of pictures first

• Put your camera/phone away

• Use all of your senses to enjoy the place

Post the trip in one or two weeks, do an intentional delete. The photos that you have should be really minimal in quantity. Don't hoard. Those photos should be enough to evoke your memories and other senses.

What he says reminds me of Marie Kondo's Sparkjoy technique. No point in hoarding photos thinking you might need it later. It is better to actively save the photos worth saving. Use the tools like Google Photos or Apple Photos, which actively syncs your camera roll with the cloud. In the desktop, once in a week or two, actively cull the photos and videos.

Your nostalgia trip will definitely be memorable. Our mind will eagerly look forward to it when it knows it is really worth it.