Edouardo Honig
Published: 07 Oct 2024. Last updated: 29 Oct 2024.
Do you remember what you ate for lunch yesterday? What about the day before, a week ago, a month ago?
I don’t remember, and I don’t think it’s important to. But if I want to know, I can find out.
When was the last time you felt euphoric? Or when did you feel downtrodden? How many times recently did you end your day feeling some type of way?
I think I remember, but it’s a bit hazy. But if I want to know, I can find out.
Recently I’ve gotten into the habit of putting my friends’ birthdays in a calendar. They’re important dates for sure, but there are probably too many birthdays to fully memorize and I don’t want to miss them, so I keep a record of it. In fact, one of the most useful features of Facebook might be its birthday reminders. If information is useful, important, or otherwise noteworthy, it should be backed up. Both cloud and physical storage is cheap anyways.
I’ve always had a fairly good memory, although I’m no chimp. However as I age I find it creepingly difficult to recall mundane and sometimes even seemingly important details of my life. A game I like to play with people is as follows: we take turns recalling events in our lives in different sequential years from our past; try it yourself: what were you doing in 2014? These are things one doesn’t actively think about, and the memory retrieval process requires some relational lookup as well as easily results in confabulation.
When language models aren’t faithful to fact, we think about grounding them with verification of retrievals and references. Actually, when we fact check humans we do the same thing. So in order to recall my past experiences with a bit more truth and trust, I’ve been taking notes on my daily life for the past five years.
My first year of notetaking was on a calendar in 2020. The first entry was six words:
hung out with $FRIEND1, $FRIEND2, $FRIEND3
By the end of that first year I was often writing a hundred words detailing my days. The following year I expanded my notetaking to include what food I eat, and extended the user interface of my daily notes to a spreadsheet:
| Date | Summary | One Good Thing | One Bad Thing | A Random Thought/Lesson | Time Spent Working | Exercised? | Stretched? | Walked/Ran > 1 mile? | Morning Weight (lbs) |
|---|
And so I have a first person account from my past selves over the last five years. It’s interesting to take an occasional peek at this window into the past, my digital diary.
This post may as well be titled "You should keep a diary" or "How I keep track of my life".
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