short span memory

'short span memory' is a term I made up to describe my declining capacity for remembering things. Given how much I ingest every day, I retain only a fraction of it. From my personal observation I would say there are two specific reasons for this. One is offloading a lot of my work to LLMs to "think" more, which takes away the manual friction for remembering stuff. The other is constantly doing more to catch up to I don't even know what.

I started realizing this when I couldn't remember the names of the characters in We Have Always Lived in the Castle (it's a fantastic book, by the way), even though I could remember the story. If I tried hard enough, maybe I could, but that's not the point. I read 1984 recently as well, and I couldn't remember a single character's name other than Winston. What was the woman's name? I think it's Julia, but anyway. While this isn't relevant info at all, it still feels weird compared to how I am able to retain everything about Percy Jackson from front to back, even though I read it so many years ago. All of this makes me feel like I'm not reading with intent. Apart from intent, I think the constant need to do more to keep up with frontier tech has probably burned a hole through my ability to take my time with stuff. Hopefully I will go through Vagabond much more slowly and make sure to enjoy it more.

I think the mundane things in life have a value to them. They help you build character by doing regular tasks in a sequential manner every day and also ingrain those tasks into your system. When I was watching Haikyuu!!, I really loved Kita's whole story. I even have this video in my pinned "perfect" playlist: Process over Results. It feels like a total 180 from how my daily life feels, and I hope that next year I will be able to spend more time on depth as I feel like I have the necessary foundation for stuff I'm working on now.

I don't have a definitive conclusion to this post and I also don't know what to do in an era where everything is so new and undocumented. In this severely fast-paced world, I would like to figure out a way to reach the depths of a topic while still being reasonably on track. I would like to read with more intent, have more conversations that aren't just related to work, and watch shows with more interest as opposed to just passing time. I used to be the person who just listened to music for hours because I loved reviewing albums. Nowadays, I don't think I can find the time for it, even though I clearly should. You cannot be behind on a path only you can walk on.