In the future, you have access to all your data. Memory, or the lack thereof, is no longer discussed. It is only assumed, a feature of modern life, since you can now relive all your past data as experiences. But because of “technical constraints,” all of your experiences are taxonomized and merged for ease of efficiency/retrieval. To access your past, then, is to relive each experience — in real time, all at once.
You begin:
You spend seven weeks holding your iPhone to your ear on hold.
You pull to refresh for seven months, click to refresh for nine.
You miss 30 Thanksgiving dinners restarting your laptop.
12 Valentine’s Days restarting your iPhone.
You swipe past iPad ads for 48 hours before ever seeing content.
You deliberate for two hours clicking the back button.
You waste four hours feeling guilty about not accepting invitations.
You go nine whole months accepting LinkedIn recommendations.
Six months seeing who’s followed you on Twitter.
One hour clicking away from ads you clicked accidentally.
For two months you stare at your browser default page.
You power through eight years of anxiety trying to unfriend people on Facebook.
You hunch over your desk for seven months downloading unregistered software.
Three straight weeks stealing someone else’s WiFi.
You tell friends you’re “off the grid” for 48 hours.
You scroll through Twitter for one year without clicking a single link.
There are 16 days you missed the point when your calls are dropped through AT&T.
And 14 hours of confusion as you try to work Skype video.
Three years of watching YouTube videos.
Sixty-five minutes liking.
Forty hours tapping.
Ninety-seven whole days right clicking.
You spend fourteen whole days without contact as you stare at the fail whale.
Three days confused as you update your WordPress install.
Two years behind updating your iPhone apps.
Seventeen months with strained eyes while you debug code.
Two years cursing Adobe Creative Suite.
You spend six months with slumped shoulders as you click “forgot password?”.
You reflect on older times. Passwords were forgotten once, and forgotten again — the next day, the next week, the next month. The thought seems idyllic. A life where small errors are experienced in lovely, small scales — one at a time.
This thought was first published by The Pastry Box Project, and its form taken from and inspired by the first chapter of David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
