It occurred to me that many of the frustrations we attribute to the present are really collisions with memory.
Take inflation. When someone says, “Milk used to be 95 cents,” they isolate one thing, price, and omit so many others: wages, productivity, life stage, and context. The comparison feels precise, but it is a cropped image. The story is determined by what remains, not what lies beyond the borders.
It is how the mind works.
We organize experience through deletions, distortions, and generalizations. These allow us to function. Without the ability to filter vast amounts of information, the world would overwhelm us. But those same mechanisms also shape and sometimes warp our perspective.
We isolate what is emotionally salient.
We omit what is structurally explanatory.
We compress complexity into verdict.
Things are worse.
Things are better.
We are falling behind.
I hear many photographers say, “I never edit my images. I want them to be authentic.” I am inclined to ask, authentic how? Shooting a close-up of a deer in a field eliminates massive amounts of detail. Every frame is a deletion. Memory works the same way.
As photographers, we routinely compare our current image to our best past work, often ignoring the conditions that made either image possible. We compare ourselves to others by generalizing from their highlight reel and omitting their unseen process.
With AI, we compare emerging tools to an idealized past or to an imagined future, distorting both.
Comparison is not the enemy. It is necessary. It helps us measure, adjust, and witness.
But when deletions, distortions, and generalizations go unexamined, comparison forms a narrative and we begin to treat the narrative as the whole truth.
Memory shapes our experience of the present just as our present quietly reshapes our memory.
Leave a Reply