Memories, algorithms, and reflections
When we hand over the act of remembering to algorithms, we miss out on the benefits of the powerful act of reflecting. And what we end up sharing is, like our data itself, stripped of the human stories that give it meaning.
Titled with apologies to the great Carl Jung whose memoir “Memories, Dreams and Reflections” is one of the most influential reads of my life.
At the end of each year, my social media feed becomes full of personal lists publicly displayed. This year was no different. As 2022 rolled into 2023, I got a rare peek into what people I know had done: music they’d listened to, books they had read, places they’d traveled to, shows they’d attended, and in some cases, played, their most-liked photos, and more.
I mostly enjoy these peeks into the reading lives of others. The book lists, especially, often prompt me to add a few more titles to my own reading queue. And because I too have read quite a bit this year and wish to promote the joys of reading generally, I decided to compile and post my own list to share.
I mostly read on Amazon’s Kindle, so I hoped the app would provide me with a handy recap that I could screen capture, share, and be done with. It didn’t. There, in a section called Reading Insights were the number of weeks I’d read in a row, and the number of days read on the app per month. There were “achievements” from “challenges” I wasn’t even aware I’d participated in, intended to spur me on like a good little girl.
A list of books that I’d read in the past year would have been there if I’d only bothered to officially mark books as finished. I hadn’t. As a result, all but three of the books I’d completed in 2022 remained in data purgatory, bobbing aimlessly about in my library of 500+ titles.
Insights? Hardly. Undoubtedly Amazon has vastly more. Where was the breakdown of genres? What time of day was I more likely to purchase books? How many of the samples I sent myself converted into purchases? How many hours a day on average did I read? What did my choice in titles say about which dishwasher I might purchase or my political affiliations? The most profitable reading insights were, it seemed, too valuable to reveal.
I headed to my notes and highlights. Here were all the books I’d read, with the most recent up top, and more so what I’d found worthy of marking down in each. Insights. Real. Mine. I felt certain Amazon’s data crawlers rarely ventured here.
Among the more heavily marked titles was Wintering by Katherine May, which I’d read the previous January. This collection of essays on the cold, dark season resonated with me because of my own love of the cold, dark season — and because May writes essays the way I wish to write essays, full of disparate ideas and imagery that she manages to bring together beautifully, as though they were always meant to be together.
Here’s just one of the many quotes I chose to highlight last year:
The year will move on no matter what, but by paying attention to it, feeling its beat, and noticing the moments of transition — perhaps even taking time to think about what we want from the next phase in the year — we can get the measure of it.
Good advice. When we hand over the act of reflection to algorithms, we miss out on the benefits of the powerful act of looking back. What we end up sharing is, like our data itself, stripped of the human nature that gives it meaning.
Rather than make a list of titles to post on social media, I decided to delve back into those books, guided by the passages I’d highlighted.
I am an avid measurer of my own life. I suppose I get this from my mother, who would jot down the most memorable aspects of each day on our wall calendar, to read at the end of each year. Once she typed out (on typewriter, no less) all the entries from a long period of my life and placed them in a binder, which I still have. So many memories that would otherwise have been lost to us are swaddled in those pages, especially since I grew up in a time when photographs were expensive and laborious to process and keep.
I started journaling at the age of 11, in a little flower-printed diary with a tiny gold lock given to me by my grandmother. I have kept it up, on and off, throughout my life. For nearly four years now, I’ve written 2–3 pages nearly every morning by hand, in the stream of consciousness style of The Artist’s Way. Though I rarely go back and read what I wrote, simply taking time to pay attention to all the thoughts and feelings and happenings rattling around my brain and coral them onto the page makes everything feel more manageable and clear.
Each Saturday morning, I set up my bullet journal, carefully drawing my weekly calendar in a color scheme that matches my mood, graphing my habit trackers, corralling my planning sections, to do lists. I go back to the prior weeks, pulling through unfinished business and reflecting on what must be done, what I wish to make happen.
Many a scheduling conflict has been identified and avoided thanks to these labors, so it serves a practical purpose, sure. But something in the act of doing this work by hand elevates it to another level. It is a meditative practice that lends texture, color, and form to the week that my digital calendar with its notifications and alerts simply cannot provide.
When my only child was born, over 10 years ago, I started a private blog. I was seeking a way to share with close friends and family the unfolding story of this wondrous human and family in a more thoughtful way than social media posts allowed. It was also true that after four years of miscarriages, fertility treatments, and many other painful things I wished to forget, I finally had something I wished desperately to hold onto. So each month I wrote and posted a lengthy entry with photos. I’ve recently shifted to posting quarterly, but I have not slacked off. Time has flown by, but I have found a way to hold onto it. It is simple, but, like the precious life I brought into this world, it feels miraculous.
Days, weeks, months, and, yes — as each January approaches, I open all my journals, blog entries, calendars, and photos and move through the prior year. Methodically, month by month. I distill this data into themes, insights, victories, and grievances. What has been. What I hope will be. I try to get my little family to participate, or at least listen, but they always seem too busy with their own quiet pursuits. So this annual ritual remains, for now, for my benefit alone.
People often wonder how I find the time. Perhaps you are wondering this too. But don’t you see? If I didn’t do these things, time would be truly lost, a blur of memories without form or structure. A waste of time.
So much of my life has been lost to time I can barely stand to think of it, even though some of that forgetting was intentional. I left behind a childhood filled with trauma and violence. I reinvented myself more than once, ditching friends and places with a casual ease that shocks me to recall. But now that I know just how short life is, I don’t wish to cling to it, nor can I let it slip through my fingers unaccounted for.
My own documentation pales in comparison to what is being done by the numerous digital tools and services I use. Whether they collect this information to provide me with “better” services and then leverage it to make money off of me or the other way around is a chicken-egg debate that I will leave to experts better versed in such matters. I’ll simply note that Shoshana Zuboff’s compelling (if dry) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism was among the titles I read in 2022, and that providing people with a much better picture of what’s being collected and how it’s being used is a big part of my current job — and leave it there.
My interest here is in what gets lost when we turn over the work of reflection to the algorithms rather than undertaking this labor for ourselves, and how the algorithms, as they are presented back to us, have an insidious way of dictating how we present ourselves to others on these forums.
Moments after Spotify’s annual Wrapped campaign was released, screen captures of people’s lists began to populate my feeds, causing me to immediately stop what I was doing and head to the app to receive my own listening insights.
Here were 45 genres too specific to be meaningful, a wild array of moods, 16,000 minutes, over 2700 songs, largely made before 2000, though Spotify kindly left out this observation lest I feel old and out of touch.
My top artist was the Beatles. Though not surprised, I was dismayed. I feel about the Beatles the way I feel about Picasso. Important to know about, but not my cup of tea. However, early in 2022, we’d watched the documentary Get Back as a family. The movie takes us behind the scenes of the Beatles’ last performance. It’s a tremendous view into the creation of some of our most enduring pop songs within a pressure cooker of hard deadlines, misaligned goals, and festering resentment. It is also peak Yoko Ono, and I do so love her.
My kiddo was drawn to the music itself, insisting we play it over and over. Not only did we listen to The Beatles repeatedly on Spotify, but my child and I learned to play Let it Be on the piano. I often learn to play songs that feel important to me, as a way to get inside the song and see how it works.
So it was true, there had been a lot of Beatles, but without the context I feared people would get the wrong impression of me. They might comment, “OK boomer,” when in fact I was a very not OK Gen Xer, as my top track revealed.
Goose Snow Cone was from Aimee Mann’s 2017 album Mental Illness. Somewhere during the year I stumbled on this song and found that it made me cry nearly every time I heard it. This was helpful to me, because I have a lot of unprocessed grief. I’ve found that if I can kickstart the tears I can release some of my pent up pain, bit by bit. So I listened, wept, and listened again — and also learned to play this song on the piano, as did my child, who wants to learn anything I play.
Additionally, I streamed a lot of music to help my child fall asleep. My child sucks at sleeping. Apparently neo classical, one of my top genres of 2022, helps. This adds up to thousands of listening hours, aided along, no doubt, by my penchant for listening to Phillip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach while riding the subway.
A colleague of mine recently referred to this phenomenon as pollution, as in, my child’s algorithms are polluting mine, muddying my personal data story. But was it really pollution, or merely an honest reflection of how music is experienced in my home? The idea of pollution only entered if I chose to share it with anyone, because the expectation then would be that my list is a reflection of me, or rather, the me I wish to share with the world. And Wrapped insights are designed and packaged for sharing.
There are many reasons to share something online. Some, of course, aim to present an idealized version of themselves. I do suspect this impulse is behind the personal lists of books and shows that arrive each December. And I supposed a certain kind of year-end playlist that wasn’t “polluted” by the Beatles and late-night piano music might accomplish that for me, as well. I do enjoy a good brag.
There is sharing to be better understood and seen by others. My 2022 song list might do that, but only with a lot of personal context that Spotify could never account for.
There is sharing to resonate with other people, to impart a little of one’s private joy. Scrolling through my Top 100 Tracks of 2022 playlist it was clear that the only person any of this would resonate with would be, well, me. So I put on my headphones and gave it a listen, memories, tears, and all — appreciating, in the end, of the effort that had been made on my behalf using the data I’d willingly provided.
Spotify declared me an “Adventurer.” This I was tempted to share. For I flatter myself to think this label is a confession on behalf of the music service’s algorithms that I am a tougher sort of nut to crack. A rebel, living so authentically on her own terms, as to avoid being pinned down by all this data I produce. See, bragging.
As Zuboff and Jean-Paul Sartre put it (coming to your courtesy of my Kindle highlights):
No matter how much is taken from me, this inward freedom to create meaning remains my ultimate sanctuary. Jean-Paul Sartre writes that “freedom is nothing but the existence of our will,” and he elaborates: “Actually it is not enough to will; it is necessary to will to will.” This rising up of the will to will is the inner act that secures us as autonomous beings who project choice into the world and exercise the qualities of self-determining moral judgment that are civilization’s necessary and final bulwark.
To which I say, fuck yes! I want to “project choice into the world and exercise the qualities of self-determining moral judgment that are civilization’s necessary and final bulwark.” Where do I sign up?
Alas, my numerous questionable purchases via Instagram ads tailored to my age, weight, and aesthetic would suggest the truth is otherwise. The truth, as always, defies easy categorization. And I do believe, in our externally examined lives, we have a duty to resist such categorization. If we don’t, it has the power to do more than part us with our capital.
During the brief time I was on Twitter, I found myself inadvertently shaping my thoughts into tweets. The medium was dictating the message. I was condensing the meaning I’d stumbled upon throughout my day into pithy statements, crafted for the pleasure of others, rather than letting it expand and breath within me. Or better yet, onto an empty page. Even if I posted nothing, was this the lens through which I wanted to view the world?
There is so much that can be known by the unknowing eyes of our various digital services and platforms, but so much more that is unknown. When it tries to play a mirror, what’s reflected is the equivalent of an 8-bit image. A recognizable shape, but little more. And when we let that image shape our memories and what we share with the world, we seem to lose something of ourselves into the void that lies just beyond.
How much more interesting than a list of books read would be a selection of passages from those books that moved and shook the reader? How much more meaningful than a song list is the recollection of how that song felt when heard at precisely right moment by the listener? How I wish, sometimes, that everyone would share these things rather than the list itself. The former feels human, while the latter as if produced by a machine. In a way it was.
Or don’t share it. Just record these moments and cherish them.
My life is far richer for all that I’ve chosen document and recall on my own terms, often with a pen rather than a screen in hand. I have the record to prove it, though for the most part, I’m keeping it to myself.
