Tag: life

How Many Photographs Do You Need to Remember Your Life?

by James Wallace Harris, 5/13/26

The average human lives around 40 million minutes, but it’s doubtful they can recall more than a few thousand. Some people try to record as much of their life as possible – they call it lifelogging. Some lifeloggers wear cameras on their chest that snap a pic every 15 minutes.

That would mean over 2,666,666 photos for the average American lifespan. That’s way more than I’d want to manage. Even if I took one photograph a day, I wouldn’t want to maintain 28,835 pictures and the memories that went with each.

Forgetting is one of the key aspects of our personalities. Strangely enough, one of the limitations of artificial intelligence is memory. Both biological and silicon minds function with finite memory. Remembering and forgetting shape who we are, whether biological beings or AI. Just because technology allows us to store more memories doesn’t mean it’s practical to integrate them into our consciousness.

If I took one photograph a week and wrote an essay about it, would it be worth trying to remember 4,120 people, places, and events? I’ve written almost 3,000 essays for my blogs, but I barely remember a tiny fraction of them. What if we tried to remember one special moment from every month we live? Would 949 be too many?

We’re getting close, at least for me. Admittedly, at 74, my ability to recall is fading. I couldn’t limit myself to a single significant moment for each of my 74 years, because some years, I’d want to remember several. This suggests my mind can handle between 300 and 600.

Even ordinary people take thousands of photos and videos with their smartphones. I have around 9,000 digital photographs, nineteen family photo albums, two boxes of loose photos, and a hallway of relatives captured in time. That’s too many.

I realize now that no one is interested in my collection of photos. The photos I save are just for me. I’ve been studying the Photos app on my Apple devices and Google Photos to decide which to make my standard. Learning how each works is helping me decide how to manage my digital memories.

Our smartphones have made us cyborgs. They extend our brains in so many ways that most of us freak out if we lose them.

Having an instant camera at our fingertips is reshaping our lives and society. Even though my iPhone has room for tens of thousands of photographs, there’s no practical way for me to psychologically manage all those visual memories.

Scientists tell us that when we dream at night, our brains decide what to remember and what to forget. Since my iPhone can’t dream, I’ll have to take over that function consciously. Photos, the app on my iPhone, will be where I do this dreaming. I’m training myself to be ruthless in my deleting because what I keep is how I’m consciously defining myself.

When my mother died, I discovered several boxes and albums of old photos. The same thing happened when my wife’s mother died. I have photos from several generations of our four parents. I also have a lifetime of photos that Susan and I took. And as my aunts and uncles have died, my cousins have sent us many photos they thought belonged with our branch of the family.

Here’s the thing. My parents only owned one camera, a Kodak Brownie. I don’t think they used more than 5-6 rolls of film over their lifetime. Each roll took 12 photos. I say that because it appears my father took fewer than 60 pictures. I assume Dad took them because he is in none of them.

I’m not sure my grandparents or their parents on either side owned cameras. I say that because there are so few photographs of them when they were young, and the ones I have seem to have been taken by professional photographers. I’m also guessing the pictures I have of their older years were taken by their children.

My parents apparently kept a roll of film in the Brownie for years at a time, taking a couple of pictures at birthday parties and Christmas. Most of the photos I have from the two generations before my parents seemed professionally shot, with a smattering of snapshots given to them by relatives.

At sixteen, I bought a Yashica twin-lens reflex because my buddies were into photography. I took two rolls of film on one family vacation, expanding the family collection by 24 images! Most of the photos my mother had were from school photos, and snaps my aunts and uncles had sent her.

I remembered my Mom and Dad on my blog with the photos I have. There weren’t that many. What does it mean to have so many pictures to remember our lives?

Things changed for us baby boomers. In the early years of our marriage, Susan and I took several dozen photos with Instamatic cameras. Then Susan bought a Canon AE1 in the 1980s and took hundreds. Since buying iPhones, we’ve taken thousands. Our closet, where we stash old stuff, contains hundreds of paper prints, but our phones and hard drives contain thousands of images.

And you want to know something sad? No one wants them. Susan and I don’t have children, but I’ve asked our nephews and nieces if they wanted them, and none of them did. Susan doesn’t really care to look at them anymore, either. We scanned the paper prints, put them on DVDs, and gave them to our siblings one Christmas, but they’ve never been mentioned since.

I’ve become the memory keeper, the archivist of the forgotten. What’s weird is that some of my friends tell me they hate to look at old photos, that it makes them sad and depressed. One of my friends says she’s thrown all her old photos away. Yet, other friends are sentimental like me, regularly posting old photos on Facebook.

Last week, a friend brought the vacation photos she took in France to show after our Mahjong game. Before she came, she asked me how many I’d want to see. Over her 19-day trip, she took 3,730 photos. I told her 300. For her own digital album to remember the trip, she chose 500.

That inspired this essay and my research. And it’s the numbers that make me philosophical. I accept my limitations and work to maximize what I can do with what I can handle.

My friend uses Photos on her Mac. I asked her how many photos her Mac and iPhone were currently managing. She said 28,500. (She’s a big-time traveler.) Well, that was far more capability than I needed for my 9,000, so I settled on Apple Photos, too. I also considered Google Photos, because I also use a lot of their products. But I settled on Photos because I use an iPhone. If I had been an Android user, I would have picked Google Photos.

I started playing with Photos on my Mac Mini and learned that my photo library would appear on all my Apple devices and iCloud. That’s very useful. I also learned that any photograph deleted from any device would be removed from all devices. That can be dangerous, but useful too.

But the more I used Photos on my Mac Mini, iPhone, and iPad, the more I realized that I didn’t want all my photos in Photos. I like using my iPhone as an external memory, and it’s not practical to find a single photo out of 9,000.

How we use photo managers like Photos can shape how we think about the past. Smartphones are changing humanity in ways we’ve yet to realize.

Over the years, I’ve developed a folder structure on my hard drive for filing photos. I’ve decided to leave my entire photo library there and make Apple Photos just for the photos I want to quickly access on my iPhone. I want Apple Photos to represent how I want to remember the past. Like a dreaming brain, I have to constantly delete.

We showed my friends photos from France on our 75″ TV using a laptop and an HDMI cable. This got me thinking about organizing my photos and viewing them on the TV. The impact of photos varies from the small iPhone screen, to the 10″ iPad screen, to the 27″ screen for my Mac Mini. The emotional impact is greatest on the 75″ TV screen. When the new Apple TV comes out, I’m going to buy one just to conveniently view my memories on the large screen.

In idle moments, often during insomnia, I’ll take out my iPhone and view photos. Sometimes, like Anne and Mike, my photos make me sad. Other times, they trigger intense, powerful emotions, which I relish like a vampire feeding on someone’s lifeblood. Mostly, these images of the past make me philosophical. They bring back memories that my mind is forgetting. I hate that I forget. But I do that more and more.

JWH

Have I Burned Out My Nostalgia Neurons by Being Too Nostalgic?

by James Wallace Harris, 5/3/26

The word nostalgia was originally coined to describe homesick Swiss mercenaries. For a long time, it was considered a malady, rather than the bittersweet emotion triggered by recalling our past. The term eventually expanded to include longing for the past in general, even for times before you were born.

The first movie I remember seeing on television was High Barbaree (1946), where nostalgia was a central theme. There is a scene early in the film where two childhood friends are separated when one of their parents moves away. The film was based on the novel of the same name by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, but it was rooted in Hall’s nostalgia for his childhood. In the novel, but not the film, we experience Alec Brooke’s last thoughts before dying. In the film, they are his last thoughts before being rescued.

At six, I had already experienced leaving friends several times. My father was in the Air Force, and we moved frequently. The movie and novel have had a lifelong impact on me. See “Did The First Movie You Ever See Haunt You For The Rest Of Your Life?“

Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I was nostalgic for my previous homes, schools, friends, and pets. For many years, I had recurring dreams of struggling to find my way back to our house in Hollywood, Florida. Those dreams stopped after I took a trip to that house in my early thirties.

My upbringing programmed me for nostalgia. I’ve always wallowed in it. Do I have more memories than the average person because I moved around so much?

When I retired, I spent years rereading my favorite books, contacting old friends and relatives, processing old photos, creating Spotify playlists of all the music I loved since 1962, collecting all the science fiction magazines I loved growing up, and watching all my old favorite movies and television shows.

Here’s the thing. I’ve been retired for thirteen years, and emotionally, it’s not what I expected. I thought my personality would have solidified in old age, but it hasn’t.

I feel I’ve psychologically changed several times in the past thirteen years. The current change is a surprise. I think I’ve burned up all my nostalgia neurons. For years, I only played one Spotify playlist composed of a thousand favorite songs from before the year 2000. Now I’m only listening to songs that came out after the year 2000. And the books and magazines that excite me the most are about current events. I haven’t given up on old friends, but so many people I used to know have died or disappeared.

Scientists have learned that memories aren’t fixed. When you recall a moment from the past, you overwrite it with new thoughts about that memory. I’m wondering if all my nostalgic reveries have overwritten my original recordings. That I’m no longer getting a nostalgic dopamine high when thinking about the past because I’m triggering recent memories that erased the originals.

Conservatives seem hell-bent on bringing the past back through political means. But can they give me back the thrill of being young and going downtown on a bus and eating at a lunch counter in the 1950s? Even if I had a time machine, would I use it?

I have a tremendous nostalgia for the 1950s and 1960s. However, would I return if I could? Without air conditioning, I’d be miserable. I’m 74, and I doubt I could get the medical care I need. What would I do? Rent a room in a rundown hotel on Miami Beach and listen to 1950s records while reading 1950s science fiction magazines? I could do that now.

I will admit, if I had a time machine, I’d make day trips to the past. Would returning to the scenes of my original memories exorcise the nostalgia that drove me back there?

I have to wonder if getting old eventually ruins nostalgia because we get wise to our fantasies? I’ve spent 74 years creating the life I have now, which is so very comfortable. Didn’t all the choices I made lead to where I am now? So, why would I jump to another place in time?

I’m returning to the idea that nostalgia is a malady. And I’m wondering if I’ve finally cured myself? Or have I? Will nostalgia return like bouts of malaria? I feel like aging is a series of transformations. I shouldn’t expect to arrive anywhere permanently.

Over the past few years, I’ve lost the ability to watch movies and television shows by myself. I had many theories as to why that was so. The main theory assumed that the Internet, YouTube, and doomscrolling destroyed my ability to focus. But I’m wondering if I was trying to watch TV by who I was in the past, and that just didn’t work. I’ve recently started watching TV again on my own, and my mind has stuck with it. Maybe my new stage of seeing things can let me relax and enjoy the shows. Before, my mind was restless.

Is that because my new non-nostalgic self has found new reasons to watch? I don’t know. My new self has found different books to read and different music to listen to. But how long will this last? I assume I will keep changing.

I have another thought. I spend a lot of time meditating about consciousness and studying it in books. I have many new theories about who I am. I no longer think of my personality as a unified, singular being. I now see myself like a computer with many parts: CPU, GPU, NPU, memory, etc. Have these discoveries undermined my nostalgic drive? Maybe self-awareness can destroy nostalgia?

This leads me to ask: Can we reprogram ourselves?

JWH

Prepping for Power Outages?

by James Wallace Harris, 4/28/26

Over the last decade, we’ve had three power outages during ice storms that lasted 3-5 days. Back in the 1990s, this house experienced a 10-day power outage during an ice storm. And in our previous house, we lived through a 13-day power outage during July and August.

We have survived all those outages with only inconvenience and discomfort. And I’ve never had any kind of emergency generator during my 74 years. It’s kind of wimpy to think about spending $15,000-20,000 dollars on the chance the power will go out for a few days. However, the older Susan and I get, the more we dislike discomfort and inconvenience.

We were lucky; the power stayed on during Winter 2025, but we were snowed in for over a week. Susan and I are afraid of falling, so we don’t go out when the ground is covered with snow and ice. News videos showing what people in Nashville, Tennessee, and Oxford, Mississippi, experienced frightened us. The destructive power of nature becomes so much scarier when you’re old.

My real fear is the pipes freezing. During these ice storms, many of our friends have had pipes burst. Now that’s more than inconvenient. The house’s temperature dropped into the forties during the last ice-storm outage. It was unpleasant, but we survived easily by wearing layers and sitting in our La-Z-Boys under several blankets. I’m considering buying some winter camping equipment.

One of the biggest problems during power outages is boredom. We solved that by getting unlimited phone plans and buying a Jackery to recharge our phones. I listened to music and audiobooks, doom scrolled Facebook and YouTube, and watched movies.

For years, I’ve been thinking about buying a whole-house generator that runs off natural gas. But I’ve always hesitated. I kept thinking whole-house battery backup might become practical.

I looked at two years of electric bills, talked to an AI that gave me some rough figures to consider.

If I’m lucky, I might get a whole-house generator installed for $15,000 to $20,000. I’d need a new electrical panel, but I’ve been thinking about that anyway. However, I’ve read that generators need an oil change after the first 25 hours and after running continuously for 50-100 hours. That would be a problem if the ground is covered in ice. Also, I know one family that spent $17,000 on a whole-house generator, and it failed the first time they needed it.

All that makes me leery of whole-house generators. Although they can last 20-30 years. (I don’t think I can, though.) That makes them a good investment.

I also researched getting something like a Tesla Powerwall. After much discussion with the AI, it was decided I’d need 40-50 kWh of battery backup to last a week-long power outage. With all the installation, the AI estimated $30,000 to $40,000. That’s way more than I’m willing to spend.

However, if the United States renovated its grid system, and I added both solar arrays and battery backups, this would be the best long-term solution.

Then I mentioned to the AI that my biggest worry was freezing pipes. That’s when it recommended a direct-vent insert for our fireplace. It should keep the house warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing, and it would work without electricity.

The AI also recommended a portable power station that could run just the blower to my natural gas heating system.

Those were two good ideas I’m considering. Battery technology is improving dramatically every year, and the prices are coming down. It might be cheaper to buy several portable units that I could roll around as needed. And I can research getting portable solar panels to put out in the yard to recharge them.

Portable power stations could run fans in the summer when the power is out. But I don’t know if they are powerful enough to use for cooking. Our water heater runs on natural gas, and it stays on when the power is out. But our stove and oven are electric. I’ve looked into Mr. Buddy heaters that use propane canisters. But propane sounds scary to use inside the house.

Let me know what solutions y’all have found.

JWH

I Need To Shut Up About Getting Old

by James Wallace Harris, 3/16/26

I find getting old fascinating. And I enjoy writing about aging. I know I’m not saying anything original, but each new observation feels new to me. But I’m starting to see that other people don’t see getting old as a rewarding philosophical experience. Even though I’m amused by my mental and physical failings, talking and writing about them is bumming out some family and friends.

My newest observation, which I should have made much sooner, is that folks don’t see me by my view of aging, but theirs. They see the aged as depressing, frail, weak, useless, and something to either avoid or not think about.

Decades ago, I noticed that famous people in their late seventies and eighties were disappearing. Then, when their obits showed up, people would say, “I thought they were dead years ago.” Is that the proper etiquette – to hide away when old?

I think some people want to grow old like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards – to publicly rock out through their eighties, (and maybe nineties?). But most people, when they get wrinkly, prefer to hide from view. I don’t want to hide, but is that what young people expect? I’ve overheard young people criticizing people in their fifties, claiming they should not be seen.

Everyone loves to see centenarians who are still working full-time at amazing jobs. Or oldsters that still define cool.

I now assume the unwritten law is that we don’t want to see people who act old. If you’re old and act young, you’re good, but not if you act your age. But I’ve often seen young people making fun of old people acting young.

That means I need to act young, but only to my friends my age. I’ve started paying attention to other old people. Most are either quiet about aging or good at acting young (younger?).

And I’ve discovered a second good reason to shut up about life on the right side of the bell curve of aging. My recent social media feeds have been getting strange. The algorithm has noticed what I’ve been saying. At first, it sent me inspirational suggestions about being positive in my seventies. Then it sent me warnings about not offending young people. After that, it sent me info on which surgeries to get and which to avoid. Then last week, things started getting even stranger. Videos about assisted living and nursing home care started showing up.

Finally, and eeriest yet, are the videos about hospice care.

Yes, I need to shut up about aging. I want my feed to go back to home repair how-tos, wild animals being friends with other wild animals, and questionable young women asking me to visit their sites. (At least the digital con artists were under the illusion I’m still young enough to want young women, or willing to pretend that I think I am.)

Since I don’t want my friends and family to feel sorry for me, I need to write about topics that don’t age me. Also, I need to be careful what I say so my feeds don’t scare me.

I wonder how the feeds will react to this post?

JWH

Finding Purpose in Retirement

by James Wallace Harris, 3/11/26

Now that I’ve been retired for over a dozen years, I can begin to generalize about this phase of life. I had a good job, one that gave me satisfaction. I was never a big success, nor ambitious, but I thought my work was useful. I felt I helped people. I spent thirty-five years working at a university, and most of that time in the College of Education.

Because we prepared teachers and counselors, I thought I was indirectly helping the world by supporting faculty, staff, and students with their computers and computer labs. I also programmed the database to track students seeking licensure, and collected statistics for the college, university, state, federal government, and several accreditation agencies. I even helped a campus Kindergarten and Elementary School with their computers. All of that gave me a sense of purpose.

I didn’t think I’d miss work when I retired, and I didn’t for many years. But after a while, I realized that I wasn’t doing anything useful. During my work years, I never worried about having a purpose. Looking back, I realized I did have one, and it was fulfilling. 

At this point, I need to confess. By the time I retired at 62, I was worn out. I just had a stent put in my heart. I had very low vitality. Even more than physically worn out, I was mentally exhausted. I came to the CoE in the 1980s, when the colleges could hire their own computer guys, but just before retirement, the university decided that all computer techs of any kind had to be part of IT. The IT department wanted all programs written in their designated language using their designated framework. Plus, they wanted me to give up my file and database servers.

Mentally, I couldn’t learn a new language. For years, I had been trying to upgrade my Classic .asp programs to ASP.NET. In my late fifties, I couldn’t make the jump from procedural programming to object-oriented programming. Programming and system administration became only a part-time job for me. Programming required long hours of focused programming. However, frequent interruptions from faculty, staff, and students for computer support kept me from programming. The college hired two guys to help me, but they could never keep up. It was actually a good thing that the IT department was taking over.

That frustration of not being able to devote myself to programming and not being able to grasp new programming concepts was a psychological revelation. I knew mentally I couldn’t adapt. When I trained the young woman from IT to take over the programming part of my job, she understood what I was teaching her as fast as I could talk. It was amazing. I realized then I was old. Her young mind worked many times faster than my old brain.

In other words, there was a reason to retire. However, waiting around to die isn’t particularly fulfilling. I thought retirement would give me all the time in the world to pursue several big dream projects. I thought about getting an M.S. in computer science. I wanted to prove I could catch up. I also wanted to write that science fiction novel I always fantasized about writing.

As the years passed, those ambitions faded away. I want to blame aging, but I don’t know if that’s true. I turned my aim to smaller goals. I thought maybe I could learn Python, an easy language, and write short stories. Those things didn’t happen either. I missed having a purpose.

Recently, I’ve discovered something else important about life. In old age, people with children are very different than people without children. Having children also gives people a purpose. Susan and I never had children. Our parents and all our aunts and uncles are long dead. Over half of my cousins are dead. And we seldom see our nieces and nephews. 

Susan and I now depend completely on friends. That’s very rewarding. However, I see friends with children and grandchildren slowly moving away. And that’s understandable. 

Among our retired friends, there’s a distinct difference between those with children and grandchildren and those without. Old folks with descendants have an inherent purpose.

I could volunteer, but I never found that satisfying, the few times I’ve tried. And now, in my mid-seventies, I don’t have the energy.

Ultimately, I found purpose in small pursuits. Doing housework and keeping up the yard keeps me busy, and it’s somewhat fulfilling. Writing blogs gives a sense of purpose. I try to help friends when I can. I’m still a computer guy.

It’s funny, though, but since I turned seventy, whenever I offer to help women friends with things they can’t physically handle, they tell me no. They worry I’m too old and might hurt my back. That reminds me of an old George Carlin routine where he talks about turning 70. He joked that he only had to reach toward something heavy and people would rush over and pick it up for him. I still feel like I can do physical things, but other people see me as being weak. I don’t like that. Several times I’ve been to Ikea or Home Depot and was loading my pickup when young people rushed over to help me. Twice, young women even got out of their cars to offer their help.

It’s tough when everyone expects you to be weak, which might explain why my lady friends stop wanting my help. Maybe getting old makes everyone more fussy about doing things for themselves.

For the first decade of my retirement, my hobbies helped give me purpose. But something is changing. I’m slowly letting my hobbies go. I think it’s because of dwindling energy, but aging might be eroding interest, too.

It’s funny how little things become more important. Susan loves to watch old TV shows while doing needlepoint. I bought a NAS, and I’m ripping DVDs of her favorite shows. It’s given me something to do for a few months, and that has been rewarding. Around me, the world is falling to pieces, but ripping DVDs provides a little bit of purpose. That’s insignificant to the bigger world, but weirdly valid in my diminishing world.

Nowadays, I go from one little project to the next. Currently, that project is setting up a post for Susan’s bird feeder with a video camera. No matter how small the project, they always end up setting me with challenges to overcome. For example, the 4×4 post I bought to fit into an existing 4×4 concrete hole in the backyard is just so slightly too big. The previous post had been planed down some. I don’t have a wood planing machine. I considered buying a hand plane, but my AI recommended a wood rasp, which I’ve ordered. After I’ve planed down the lower 18 inches, I’ve got to put on wood sealer and then paint it. This little project will keep me busy for days.

That’s where I find purpose now, with little projects. And as I get older, I expect those projects to get ever smaller. I’m reminded of a short story by R. A. Lafferty, called “Nine Hundred Grandmothers.” A human explorer visiting an alien planet discovers an intelligent species that never dies. They just get older and smaller. He tracks down the most ancient ones in a cave, where they line a shelf on the wall, always getting smaller. That’s how I picture myself getting older, pursuing smaller and smaller projects.

JWH