The Museum of What You Used to Know

Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, the unofficial World’s Most Positive Human, revealed in a recent conversation with Tim Ferriss that he is a ferociously dedicated diary-keeper. Every night, round about midnight, he faithfully jots down notes — just what has shaken out from the day. He has made it his mission to encourage everyone to do this.

“I go do a talk and I say, ‘How many people keep a journal?’ It could be like a group of 400 people, and I’ll see two hands, three hands. I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, if I can leave you with one thing from today it’s this. Please keep a journal.’ This is my thing now, this is my theory: Living is reliving.”

Living is Reliving. I like that.

But wait. Doesn’t this contradict everybody’s favourite personal commandment, Live in the moment? The instant you reach for a notepad or raise your phone to your face at a concert to capture the moment, aren’t you in a sense missing the moment—by breaking the spell of the raw experience of Right Now? A little bit. But it’s worth it, in Rodriguez’s view. Because the opportunity cost of not tagging the event in your mind is steep. “The moment fleets,” he said. “You’re not going to remember it tomorrow. From day to day, shit just goes by.” You think you’re going to remember that funny or profound thing. But you aren’t. It will be gone.

It’s astonishing how quickly and completely memories degrade. “We see life at 96 frames per second, 20k resolution, surround sound,” Rodriguez said. But “a year from now, five and then 10, all that metadata will be gone. All we’ll remember” — he was speaking now of this convo with Tim — “was that we met had a good time.” All other detail will be irretrievably gone. Unless you have taken notes.

Here the Spotlight function is your friend. This is the little little window on your computer screen where you can search by word or phrase. If you’ve digitized your diary entries, you can go into your archive, plug in something that’s likely to be part of the story. Say, guitar. “Guitar, guitar, guitar,” Rodriquez said. It shocked him to re-learn that this fancy favourite guitar was a gift. He thought he’d bought it. “How can I not remember? This is like a $10,000 guitar. How would I not remember that? And then I would read a little bit of the diary around it. I was floored. If you go back 10 years, even five years, it’s like you’re reading someone else’s journal.”

In the moment, in our lives as we live them, we don’t know what’s important, Rodriquez said. It’s only in retrospect that we can make meaning. Wait, though: if you don’t know what’s important, how do you know what to make a note of? The best clue is that you’ve just had a strong emotional reaction: something made you laugh, or go, Ew, gross! Or go … Cool – I can’t wait to share that! That’s what you write down.

This is how you save your life. Keeping a diary – literally and figuratively – saves your life.

This was one of my original motivations for this OBD project. Like Rodriguez, who is now in his fifties, I was finding my memory muscle had weakened. The wetware is wonkier, the desk drawers up there crammed full. “I find myself having to leave myself breadcrumbs all day, just to know what I’m doing, much less what I already did,” Rodriguez said. When you go back, “you find some really fun stuff.”

True dat. Early one morning four months ago, as the girls and I sat watching the mist clear from the flanks of a volcano in Costa Rica, I brought up my “Maddy” file, and up came a litany of hilarious things she said as a little kid. Absolute gold. And now that moment — the volcano moment — is itself a new memory in the mix. These rememberings cement connection. The quotes and jokes become shibboleths as we repeat them. They enter the family lore. I always say a Big Day heats you three times: once as you plan it, then again as you live it, and then again when you re-live it, by revisiting the entry on it. The best ones are granular enough to capture the shifting currents of the day, the frustrations and breakthroughs, the little insights.

(I think, by the way, that we are way underindexed in the project of recapturing what we used to know. Often, revisiting old knowledge – turns of mind, insights, emotions, facts – yields a greater ROI than the much sexier prospect of leaning into something utterly new. Re-learning is so much quicker than learning. Because you’ve hacked through the jungle once. There’s overgrowth, but you’re not faced with the rank bushwacking that starting from scratch entails.)

A rebuttal to all this might be: Hey, the past is past, Life’s too short to keep looking backward, wallowing in nostalgia. But actually, I find that the people who keep diaries are least likely to live in the past. Because in some way you have dealt with it those events now, parked them in a safe place. You can revisit them, but you aren’t compelled to revisit them, in a way that people do when there’s a vague itch of something unresolved, just beyond memory.

Diary-keeping yields compound interest. The longer you journal, the greater the dividends. Meaning-making only really happens over the run of time. Patterns become clear over those long, long cycles. Rodriguez has discovered many of what he calls “full-circle moments” – for him they seem to happen around twenty years. Every couple of decades you find yourself at the same place again, having come full circle (but at higher elevation now). Your kids say or do something that rhymes with someone you said or did. And you see the fruit of something you seeded long ago.

“I tell myself I want to be the guy looking through the windshield, not in the rear-view mirror,” Rodriguez said in an earlier interview with Tim. “But sometimes you can see better through the windshield if you look through the rear-view mirror first. It kind of makes sense of where your relationships are going, and what you’ve learned.”