I don’t remember where I read this exactly, but I once encountered the idea that there’s a hidden calculation we rarely make when acquiring possessions. Beyond the price tag lies another cost: the monstera in my living room requires not just water but a particular quality of attention, a relationship of sorts. The cast-iron skillet that I bought during a spontaneous online shopping spree demands re-seasoning a few times per year. We seldom consider these future commitments while standing at the checkout counter or when clicking “confirm purchase” on a website at midnight.
It struck me last month, as I scrolled through photos from a trip to the Galapagos Islands three years ago, that experiences carry their own version of this hidden cost. The mind, for all its wonders, can only hold so much. I found myself looking at a picture of my tour guide in San Cristobal where I remember having an enlightening conversation about how the island came to be, but I couldn’t recall a single thing we discussed—only that it had seemed important enough at the time that I’d promised myself I wouldn’t forget it.
People have been writing journals for centuries, of course; I’ve recently explored creating a “second brain” system, initially to collect quotes from books or organize knowledge. Now I’m attempting to merge these approaches, keeping a weekly journal for personal moments—the unexpected depth of a lunch conversation with my friend’s roommate in Malmö where we bonded over our experiences as an immigrant, or the spots I told myself I’d come back to so I can take more pictures of—while using Obsidian as a digital archive not just for reading notes, but also for travel observations and reflections on life. Yet even digital memory-keeping demands payment in time. The experiences must still be recorded, tagged, organized. After returning from my Dolomites hike last September, exhaustion won over documentation, which explains why my travel journal now trails behind, and I’ve been struggling to finish my Dolomites travel journals for over three months now.
For a while, social media seemed to offer the perfect solution. Every platform now has an ephemeral story feature that can be archived; a digital memory keeper requiring minimal effort, especially now that the act of capturing moments in a story has become such a muscle memory to some that I’ve watched people automatically raise their phones before their brains have even registered something worth capturing. It makes archiving nearly effortless, and I can’t imagine the bulk of archives our future historians have to go through. But this ease becomes its own kind of burden and eventually turns into a compulsion to document everything as it happens. At Glastonbury last year, during one of the sets, I watched a woman in front of me record the entire performance, her arm held steadily for ninety minutes. She experienced the entire event through a five-inch screen, present and absent simultaneously. I found myself wondering if she ever watched the footage again, or if the act of recording had become an end in itself. Artificial intelligence takes this even further, with wearable devices promising to record every waking moment and transform them into meeting notes or searchable memories, seemingly determined to outsource remembering and maybe even thinking.
But archiving and reflecting are fundamentally different processes: one collects; the other transforms. Archiving gathers moments like ticket stubs collected from concerts and movies, stored in a memory box you never open except after the next concert, gradually fading and losing context. Reflection is like taking those same tickets out on a quiet evening, running your fingers over their worn edges, remembering not just the show but the spicy aroma of the Korean fried chicken that you had to reluctantly throw away at the venue entrance because outside food wasn’t permitted. You recall the surprising solidarity of singing to Billie Eilish alongside teenagers—you in your mid twenties, they barely thirteen, all of you gloriously, defiantly single in that moment, united in your conviction that love is ultimately doomed but somehow worth singing about anyway. The ticket itself isn’t the memory; it’s merely the key that unlocks the experience of that night, complete with its disappointments, joys, and surprises.
Since I started hiking, I have always kept detailed hiking journals: I would bring pieces of paper to write on during my trip (adding significant weight to my pack, much to the amusement of ultralight hikers who obsessively measure plastic water bottles to find out which one weighs the least), and then expand on them and publish them here so others can read them, too. And each time I revisit them, I discover the memory doesn’t just return: it deepens. My brief notes about the three consecutive mountain passes I had to climb and descend after Passo Giau somehow unlock more details with each reading. I remember the gloomy shade of the sky that day, the feeling of wanting to give up, the mediocre sandwich I consumed under a big rock as I tried to shelter myself from the intermittent hail—possibly the only time in history anyone has ever looked longingly at a soggy ham and cheese while being pelted with ice. It’s as though the act of processing the experience through writing created not just a record but a living seed that continues to grow. The memory expands rather than fades, unlike the hundreds of unprocessed photos from the same trip that remain static.
Yet even with this conviction, I find myself caught in a delicate balancing act. There were evenings in during my hike when I chose to linger over dinner with my new hiking friends rather than return to my room to write. Sometimes I wonder what I’ve lost by not documenting those moments. Other times, I realize that the very act of observation changes the experience itself. The mental narration that accompanies my experiences when I know I’ll write about them later can distance me from the very current moment. I become both participant and observer, experiencing and processing simultaneously, which creates a different kind of memory altogether, like watching my own life through a slightly delayed livestream.
For years, I tried to write more—setting aside time each evening, carrying notebooks everywhere, creating elaborate systems to capture everything, obsessing over Obsidian tags and the perfect writing system that reduces the friction between me and the act of writing. I’ve spent more time organizing my notes than actually writing them, a productivity paradox that would be funny if it weren’t so common. But over time, it became clear that the issue wasn’t just commitment or technique. The real limitations were time and space—not just having enough hours in the day to document experiences, but having the mental space to process them. Our lives have become so crowded with constant input that we rarely have room to digest what we’ve already taken in. The unprocessed experiences pile up like unread books, each one valuable but collectively overwhelming, and eventually the texts on the paper fade away.
If time and space are an issue then, maybe it’s time to question: what deserves preservation, and which experiences might better serve us by simply passing through? An unfinished journal can become its own source of quiet anxiety, but so too can the thought of memories slipping away undocumented. Perhaps the real skill isn’t perfect record-keeping but discernment—recognizing which experiences merit the effort of preservation and which have already done their work by changing us in ways we may never fully articulate. Some moments transform us in the experiencing itself—they become part of our cellular memory, shaping how we move through the world without needing the intermediate step of documentation. The difficult conversation that shifts our perspective might be more powerful left to work its changes quietly within us than dissected on the page. Last year, when I visited my mom during an emergency trip, there was one moment in our bedroom where we were just mostly quiet. I wrote nothing about this afterward, took no photos, made no record—and yet that shared silence resolved a tension between us that has lasted for as long as I can remember. Some things, it turns out, are too important to risk diminishing with words.
Some views need only to be witnessed, their significance preserved not in words but in how they quietly reshape us. Others call for the effort of keeping, another entry in our overdue collection. The wisdom, perhaps, isn’t in recording everything but in recognizing which moments would truly diminish us in their absence. Sometimes the most impactful entry might be the one we never write, but merely live.