Honestly, going through and getting therapy and doing the work nowadays, I'm more afraid of the ones I'll find than the ones I'll eventually lose.
this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2025
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Oh, that fear gets much worse when dealing with people with various forms of dementia.
I honestly hope that I die before I get really bad dementia.
Amnesia is my #1 fear
I've 0 recollection of my school years, where I was consistently bullied and harassed. If I can't remember something it's problably for the better.
Everytime you access a memory you change it. Create memoirs (journals, pictures, collages) to snapshot them at a point in time.
Its not so bad. Just continue to be your best and continue to improve. Be nice. Be generous, kind, caring, charitable. Go out of your way sometimes to be good to people.
Ive had a few concussions, been knocked out a few times, and 1 traumatic brain injury. (Accident prone). I know im forgetting a bunch, but I cant remember what im forgetting, so it doesn't really affect me generally.
Ive had a fairly eventful life, at times exciting life. Ive been around the world. Done missionary work in Mexico and Peru, helping an orphanage building a well, visiting a youth jail in Mexico. Sailed thd Amazon river bringing medicine/water/supplies/bibles to different villages on the Amazon river. Er...
Thats all to say, if youre a good person and do good things, people will remember and can remind you again later if you forget!
Its dangerous to live shitty acting shitty treating people like shit AND have a bad memory. If you forget who you were shitty to and not watching your back thats trouble. Better to just be remembered as a good guy.
yes and no.
I remember everything. well, I guess it's better to say I remembered everything.
until 2020 I remembered everything and had a near 95% recall. after I got covid and stress/anxiety ate away at my sanity it's more like 80% now. My age is also a factor.
remembering everything, every detail, did me more harm than good honestly. all the embarrassing moments in my life from my first class recital in kindergarten where I fucked up my lines to the time a hooked up with a "dead fish".
I'm on the other side of my life now and most the crap I remember isn't worth it.
there are some good memories I'd like to keep, but when I do finally forget them (and I will forget them), I won't even know I forgot anything at all.
I think memory works different for different people. I am nearly 30 and I don't really remember much from elementary school (I mean the general experience, not the knowledge of course), nor a big part of my early life up to like 13-14 years old (but it might be connected to childhood trauma).
I am pretty good at learning new words in foreign languages and other similar stuff though.
Yes, very much so. Everyone here talked at length about this already, but I remembered the book Flowers for Algernon, which, among several other more significant things in the book, talks about this.
I really recomend you read the book before this spoiler, since it kinda kills the moment.
the end of the book
At the very end of the book the main character knows only that they bring flowers to a grave everyday, but don't remember who's burried. And it's one of the few moments media made me cry. because memory issues hit me really hard.
You get used to it.
if I get a concussion and forgot everything, I wouldn’t really be… well… “me” anymore
I get what you mean by this. It's been my theory for a while that your memories are "you", so it's no longer "you" if you lose even half of your memories. You're an entirely different person. Everything that we are, are contained in these memories. If you cloned a person then automatically, they will be a different person from the start. Simply because the memories they make will be different and are no longer identical. It's why I think if someone loses their memories through diseases like Alzheimer's or dementia, it's no longer "them".
Hell, every time you go to sleep, you will wake up an entirely different person. Ship of Theseus style. Your memories and even the cells in your body are slowly being replaced by new ones. So... in a way, every single second of our life, we are no longer the "me" that we were and we are now someone else.
Hi. Apparantly the "Yesterday-Me" made this post. What an intetedting post, this "Yesterday-Me" person seems like a very smart person, unfortunately his reign has ended, and it's time for MY REIGN (for the rest of this day).
And it's time to make pineapple pizzas illegal!! Lol. I wouldn't worry so much about your memories. Other folks in here have suggested some good methods to keep track of things. Journaling, photography, art, these are all great ways to keep track of your memories! I used to write about my dreams after I had them so I'd remember and what surprised me was how I had completely forgotten them when I reread my journal.
It was like I reading something written by someone else entirely!
Nope, not at all. I never liked making anything 'permanent' and prefer to do temporary things instead, like building sandcastles. Maybe that has something to do with each other
Only one way to save them. Write a diary or a mini biography. Just pick some stories you like and write them down and they become permanent.
You have to accept that as a meat machine your memory is imperfect and will fail. I have been tested within the top 1% fir long term memory several times over the course of my youth. Im now 50 and while I could recall most of the first 30-35 years of my life Im beginning to get bad at remembering names of coworkers or when I worked at jobs I held within the last 15 years. Memory loss comes for everyone.