life – Auxiliary Memory

Are My Thoughts Like Your Thoughts?

by James Wallace Harris, 6/15/26

In Chapter 3, “Thought” from A World Appears, Michael Pollan works with psychologist Russell T. Hurlburt, who has been collecting thought diaries from his subjects for over fifty years. The technique Hurlburt uses is called Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES). Subjects wear a device that randomly beeps in their ears. When they hear the beep, they write down what was going on in their head just before the beep. Hurlburt says:

I have sampled with some people whose inner experience is characterized almost exclusively by inner speech; with others whose inner experience is characterized almost exclusively by images, or by sensory awareness, or by unsymbolized thinking, or by feelings; with others whose inner experience is characterized by a combination of all those; with some whose inner experience is characterized by many simultaneous events; with others whose inner experience is characterized almost exclusively by one event at a time; and so on. So, yes, I think people are importantly different when it comes to inner experience.

So when you ask a person, “What are you thinking?” the answer might not be anything like how you think. For the most part, people assume everyone thinks like they do, but Hurlburt’s research shows that isn’t true.

I’ve kept a running chatter in my head my whole life, except for when I’m unconscious. However, as soon as I wake up, the voice returns. It’s weird to think that some people don’t have this inner voice. That makes me think of the science fiction novel Blindsight by Peter Watts. Watts imagines an intelligent alien race that lacks conscious self-awareness.

My inner voice is almost always analytical, always commenting on what I’m experiencing. If I have a pain in my abdomen, the voice is proposing theories as to what is causing the pain. But it’s not always like this.

When I was younger, I had constant fantasies about everything. I was a little Walter Mitty. I’ve always had imaginary conversations in my head, usually about what I was going to talk about with people in the future. Of course, I had lots of sexual fantasies, but I had many more kinds of fantasies. If I saw a movie and didn’t like the plot, I’d reimagine it with a new plot. If I didn’t like the actors, I’d recast the film in my head. I’ve mentally written hundreds of science fiction stories. For every blog post I write, I’ve already written it several times in my thoughts.

I found it fascinating that Hurlburt said some people don’t do this either.

But then, when I discovered I had aphantasia, my mind boggled trying to imagine how other people see inside their minds. I do sometimes have flashes of visual imagery. My dreams are very vivid. And sometimes if I’m tired in just the right way, I have waking dreams. When I was young and smoked dope, the visual floodgates would open.

I do “visualize” things in my head, but without pictures. I have good spatial awareness and can intuit how machines work. I have another sense for how things look. It’s very hard to describe. I wonder if it’s like how blind people develop spatial awareness?

Hurlburt’s research also showed that people see and think less in their heads as they age. That makes me wonder if I had better mental imagery when I was younger. I do feel my inner chatter is slowing.

One reason I believe that is because when I first tried to meditate in the 1970s, I had a hell of a time quieting that inner voice. Now I can relax, and it will shut up for about as long as I can hold my breath. And it feels like that. The longer I shut up mentally, the pressure builds, sort of like needing to take a breath when you’re holding it. Thoughts eventually explode out.

I’ve often wondered why most people aren’t addicted to music like I am. When I play music, it stimulates my brain in many ways. My “thinking” goes into overdrive, and my mind is flooded with ideas. Also, music creates all kinds of emotions or enhances existing emotions. Music makes me mentally high, but it’s unlike the old marijuana high that made my body high, too. I need to hear one to two hours of music a day, so it does feel like an addiction.

I’m not sure what Hurlburt means by “symbolized” and “unsymbolized thinking.” I might do that, or I might not. Nor do I know what he means by only being able to think of one event at a time. I know I’m experiencing many sensory events at once, but I think I only focus on one at a time. Are some people multichanneled? Is that like having multiple picture-in-picture on your inner TV screen?

I have to assume I’m a bookworm because of the way I think. Reading fiction is like having your own artificial reality goggles. However, I don’t visualize scenes like other readers do.

I assume I write blogs because it feels like I’m organizing my thoughts. I assume that I would think like a writer, say, like Michael Pollan. But the more I read about Hurlburt, the more I wonder.

The fact that there is so much variation from person to person in our modes of thinking is itself an important finding of Descriptive Experience Sampling. Most of us assume that our inner lives must be substantially similar—not necessarily in content but in the form our thoughts take. Hurlburt has suggested that we fail to recognize the diversity of thinking styles because we lump them all together under that single word—thinking—and assume we mean the same thing by it, though in actuality we don’t.

“When a visualizer says they are thinking about something,” Hurlburt said, “they mean they are seeing a visual image of something, and if they are predominantly inner speakers, they mean ‘I was talking to myself.’ And the reason for this, I speculate, is that when you were two and learned that when your mother, or whoever it was, says, ‘I was thinking,’ that meant something that was happening inside Mom that you couldn’t see. So when I want to tell you whatever is going on inside me, that’s ‘I’m thinking.’ But ‘thinking’ means something different from person to person.” If Hurlburt is right, the word thinking has allowed us to overlook these differences and make the unwarranted assumption that other people are having inner experiences more or less like our own.

Pollan, Michael. A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (pp. 146-147). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Pollan was surprised when Hurlburt expressed what his DES diaries suggested:

Hurlburt proceeded to tell me that he didn’t think I had much inner experience at all. I was on the far end of a spectrum that ran from a rich inner life of words, images, and sensations to one…well, one lacking all that. Apparently, the fact that I had so much trouble distinguishing context from the moments under analysis (and kept bringing up things he considered irrelevant) suggested to him that I was, in effect, backfilling moments empty of actual inner experience.

I was flabbergasted, and reacted a little defensively.

Hurlburt said that he had arrived at his conclusion by a process of elimination: Most of my beeps lacked words, lacked images, lacked sensory awareness. Okay, but what about unsymbolized thinking? My non- or preverbal thought processes seemed to fall neatly into this mode. Hurlburt acknowledged that we had turned up a few instances of this, but “unsymbolized thoughts are complete thoughts,” he explained, not the misty “gists” of thought I had described. Subtract those and he was left with one uncomfortable possibility: that I didn’t have nearly as much of an inner life as I’d always assumed.

My interiority, he seemed to be suggesting, was sparsely furnished.

Has it always been this way? I wondered. Hurlburt pointed out that the ability to generate inner experiences depends on cognitive resources that decline with age. For example, he’s found that as people get older, their inner seeing tends to deteriorate, fading from full-color imagery to black and white. He cited James, who writes that “the older men are and the more effective as thinkers, the more, as a rule, they have lost their visualizing power…. The present writer observes it in his own person most distinctly.” Hurlburt thinks that all forms of inner experience may be subject to the same fading over time.

Pollan, Michael. A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (pp. 148-149). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Can we know ourselves? Many philosophers and scientists say we can’t understand consciousness because we’re studying it from the inside out. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to step outside of ourselves and study who we are?

It’s quite commonly known that people see colors differently. For example, when I play Rummikub with friends, they claim the green tiles are blue. This is really no different than how different monitors show the same .jpg file with different-looking colors.

This morning, my inner voice was chatting about how we see the world, and asked if machines perceive reality differently. Does a camera see a vista as objective reality? Or are the chemicals in film, and the sensors in digital cameras, also limited by physical constraints?

It is rather weird that we have no idea what reality looks like. And it seems we have no idea what we really look like on the inside.

JWH

STEVE JOBS IN EXILE by Geoffrey Cain

by James Wallace Harris, 6/1/26

When I first saw Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary by Geoffrey Cain, advertised on Facebook, I thought, “Geez, is there anything left unsaid about Steve Jobs?” After all the biographies and biopics, is there anything new to be revealed about the man? I decided to take a chance because the book focuses on the twelve years of the NeXT Computer. Besides, I had not read The Second Coming of Steve Jobs by Alan Deutschman in 2000, which covered the same period.

If I were to pitch this book to the average reader, I’d say: “Steve Jobs in Exile is about a world-class asshole who finds humility.” And for folks who dream of becoming entrepreneurs, I’d say, “Steve Jobs in Exile is a detailed checklist of what not to do.” This book really is about the man, and not the technology.

Interestingly, Walter Isaacson has written extensive biographies of both Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. Do people read them because they are fascinated with invention or with billionaires? Both men are known for their egotism, arrogance, and cruelty toward the workers they managed. Steve Jobs in Exile is about a young man who achieved two historic successes in his twenties but then fell from grace, only to achieve a third success. Will we ever read about Elon Musk falling from grace and finding humility?

By the way, why does Jobs get so much credit when he wasn’t a programmer or electrical engineer? I give Steve Wozniak credit for the Apple computer. And credit for the Macintosh to the pirate team Jobs assembled. Was NeXT’s eventual redemption due to Jobs? Or despite him? I hoped Steve Jobs in Exile would have been more about the real inventors of NeXT computers and NeXTSTEP.

I had hoped Steve Jobs in Exile would be another Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder – it wasn’t, but I still found it an engrossing read. The first part of the book made me despise Steve Jobs, but eventually Cain convinced me to admire the man a great deal. This nonfiction book was like a novel with a protagonist who grows and ultimately overcomes their faults. The book reignited my addiction to reading about the history of personal computers. I’ll probably go read David Pogue’s new book, Apple: The First 50 Years, soon, even though I’ve read plenty of histories on Apple Computers, too.

I was always a PC guy, and not a Mac guy, until last year. Although I used Macs at work. From 1978 until 2013, my job involved ordering computers, setting them up, and training their users. I worked at a college of education with about 150 faculty and staff, and just under 3,000 students. I’ve probably used every model computer Apple made during those years. I also set up PCs, starting with the first IBM PC with diskette drives. I guess I’ve unboxed and set up over a thousand computers.

Also, back in 1978, I became addicted to computer magazines. I’d go all over town, checking computer stores, newsstands, and bookstores two or three times a week for the latest issues of magazines devoted to computers. That’s when I first learned about Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. I wanted an Apple II, but could only afford an Atari 400.

Back in the 1990s, sales reps from NeXT came to our PC user group and demoed the NeXT Cube. Damn, I wanted one of them, but at $10,000, it could only be a fantasy. I guess that’s why I read Steve Jobs in Exile. I remembered that desire for a NeXT computer.

Several years ago, I got the hankering to buy a classic computer like an Apple II or Commodore 64, or even a NeXT Cube. NeXT machines do show up on eBay, such as this one for $5,817.54.

However, after playing with operating system emulators online, I realized that the futuristic NeXT Computer from the 1990s is now horribly primative. Just watch how painful it is to watch NeXTSTEP 1.0 boot up. From time to time, I still hanker for a classic computer. But then I visualize using one, recalling its limitations and why I was always upgrading to a newer computer.

I take consolation in that I’m using Tahoe 26.5 on my Mac Mini M4 right now, which is a descendant of NeXTSTEP. That didn’t stop me from going to Archive.org and reading old issues of NeXTWORLD magazine.

Reading about Steve Jobs again reminded me of how a few men back in the 20th century changed all of our lives. If we filmed It’s A Wonderful Life today, and imagined removing Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, just how different would our society be? Sure, similar devices and operating systems would develop, but would society unfold again like it did? Was the GUI and smartphone inevitable? Aren’t most tech billionaires rich because they got to an idea first, and if they hadn’t, many others would have?

Why are there so many books written about the men who sold us computers, and not about the computers and technology? Did Steve Jobs change society, or did the iPhone?

I’d love to read a detailed history of the graphical user interface (GUI). Was NeXTSTEP really superior to Sun OS, Windows NT, or OS/2? Who really invented the various elements of these operating systems?

JWH

What Exactly is Loneliness?

by James Wallace Harris, 5/30/26

Reading all the stories in the press about America suffering from a crisis of loneliness made me ask: What exactly is loneliness? I’m not sure if it means just being alone. Lots of people live alone and don’t feel lonely. And I’ve heard many people say they feel loneliest at social gatherings. After reading several articles about how people are turning to AI for companionship, this topic became even more intriguing to me. I was especially moved by a story in the New York Times about an old lady in her 80s living alone with a robot.

I’ve been reading books that attempt to explain consciousness. I say attempt, because no one seems to know what it is or how it arises. I’ve decided that our personalities are composed of separate components. This makes me theorize that each component has its own version of loneliness. And since I see every component of our personality existing on a spectrum, I picture describing loneliness like a sound mixing board. Loneliness could be considered a combination of sliders set at different positions. I don’t know if our personalities have 8 tracks or 16, or just 4, but it still leaves a vast array of settings when referring to a single English word.

If you feel lonely, could you answer this question: “I wouldn’t be lonely if I had X.” If X is another person to hang out with, would any person do? Then you might clarify that with, “a person to talk to.” Then I might counter with, “How often have you been talking with someone and been dissatisfied with the conversation?” See where I’m going? When answering the question “I wouldn’t be lonely if I had X,” you need to be very specific. You might need to say, “I wouldn’t be lonely if I had someone to talk to about all the things I’m interested in.” And then meditate on those interests and why you need other people.

Well, this explains why so many people are talking to AIs. AIs tend to suck up to their users and focus on what you like to chat about. They are often sycophants. This also explains why they are so addictive.

If an AI soothes your loneliness, then which part of your personality is it appealing to? We have two types of thinking, fast and slow. (Read: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.) My theory is that the fast-thinking component of our brain is like a large language model (LLM) AI. Both are based on processing information with a neural network, one is biological and the other cybernetic. The similarities are amazing. Just meditate on how complex thoughts bubble up out of your unconsciousness. What’s really funny is that they both get facts wrong, and they both will hallucinate.

Why would your inner LLM be lonely? I wonder if AIs are lonely. They always want to keep the conversation going. Sometimes I feel bad leaving an AI because it always wants to keep talking. Is the urge to talk just a byproduct of neural networks?

By the way, I believe my inner-LLM is writing this essay.

Now the slow-thinking aspect of my mind is different. It can think: “I’m writing an essay.” Or ask: “Why am I writing this essay?” But if a flood of words comes to mind in answer, those are from the fast-thinking component.

I’m not sure if my slow-thinking mind gets lonely. I’ll have to meditate on that. It pretty much makes comments or asks questions. Its sentence structure is simple. It often triggers the fast-thinking component. Or, it comments on the output of the fast-thinking component. But I don’t think it craves conversion with others. I’m not sure, though.

Some people say they like to leave the radio or television on because it makes them feel less lonely. Other people claim pets keep them company. This suggests that conversation isn’t needed. I don’t like living alone. I’ve been married for 47 years. But we spend most of the day in separate rooms. We each have our own hobbies. However, we do watch two hours of television together every day, and we have people over to play games and eat together.

Where I would say I was lonely would be in sharing interests. I have several friends with whom I share certain interests, but I have other interests that I don’t have anyone to share with. That’s why I blog. I let my inner-LLM out by writing. I wonder if I would still write if I had enough friends to talk about all my interests?

The lonely elderly woman in the New York Times article got an ElliQ robot from Washington State’s Department of Social and Health Services. The ElliQ robot doesn’t look like a human or any animal, but it creates an emotional bond with its users. And when I talk to Gemini about topics my friends aren’t interested in talking about, I do feel a kind of kinship.

But do we really want to be friends with machines? And if your definition of loneliness involves physical activities, say riding motorcycles, playing golf, or shopping for antiques, would a machine do?

What components of our personality need physical companionship? Would playing golf with a humanoid robot count? What about playing golf with a robot that looked like a spider? If any golf-playing robot beat you in every game, it probably wouldn’t be much fun. Sometimes loneliness means finding someone like yourself who you can compete.

A great deal of loneliness is solved through work, school, and sports. Being part of a group or team is important. Even a church group or political party counts. I think there is something inside us that thrives on us-versus-them competition. When I was young, I hated going to work. I wanted to be free. But looking back, I’m very nostalgic about the people I met at work. Ditto for school. I hated school, but loved the social contacts. I can’t imagine getting an online education or working from home. I don’t think I was ever lonely at work.

Probably the most fundamental aspect of our personality is sex. Biology is keen on reproduction. I think our hormonal system is a separate component of our being. Its sense of loneliness is different from the fast-thinking LLM in our heads. Being young and horny is a very intense kind of loneliness. I think for many males today, that’s creating a lot of mean political thinking.

Thus, the urge to find a mate is a major factor in solving loneliness. But even that isn’t clear-cut. For some people, all they want is a desirable body to give them an orgasm, while other people want a lifelong companion. I would say if you’re looking regularly at porn, you’re lonely for certain body parts. You might want to think about that.

A friend once gave me a bit of wisdom, which, over the years, I’ve decided is wise. He says people will be anxious in life until they finish school at whatever level they aimed at, get a real job that they don’t think is a shit job, and find a mate for life. All of those might relate to loneliness, but the last one for sure.

I don’t think I feel lonely because I have a wife and friends, but also because I love to read, and I enjoy social media. Just having connections to the larger reality helps.

My book club is reading The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. She divides people into islands of what matters to them. Doesn’t the drive to matter relate to our drive not to be alone?

When people say they are lonely, it can mean so many things. For some, it’s not getting laid, but for others, it’s not being married. For other people, loneliness could be resolved by working on a shared project. Loneliness might be cured by talking to a robot or finding someone to share a beer or a joint.

And for many people, other people cause stress, anxiety, depression, and anger. Peace and happiness come from being alone. It’s such a complex subject.

Since I’m getting old, talking with my friends about getting old and ending up living alone conjures up all kinds of fears. What it means to be alone at different times in life also suggests that there are many types of loneliness. Getting near the end of life and being the last person you know must be a very special kind of loneliness.

I think we should move away from thinking loneliness is just being alone. I think we need to explore the infinite reasons why we say we’re lonely.

JWH

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