What Is the Price of a Memory?

I was backing up a lot of photos and videos to a secondary backup this week. Finally set up the back up of my back up. Lol.

This process made me go through pictures that are only a few months old. Maybe 5? And in that space of time it has morphed from a lived experience to something oddly nostalgic. Seems the gestation period for this conversion is a few months.

At this point, the pictures become a portal that transport you to a time in your life in a way you couldn’t have appreciated at the time you were making these memories, even if you were living in the moment and enjoying it as best as you could. And now, that effort to live a little has a compounding effect of a pleasant memory.

It's also enough time to not have the exact amount you paid for those experiences at your fingertips, unless of course it was crazy expensive or stupid cheap.

Basically, what I'm getting at is, once enough time passes, the amount of money you spend on an experience becomes irrelevant. But you don't forget how the experience made you feel.

I've been thinking about the compounding effect of a memory. One of the many things that has clicked in my mind this year is that everything has a compounding effect, not just money. Relationships, knowledge, skills, even trauma have a compounding effect. The eighth wonder of the world, they call it. The thing we’d never truly grasp because our brains aren’t designed to think exponentially intuitively.

If a memory has a compounding effect, then it stands to reason, that like money you invest, the returns may be exponential or even unquantifiable. They may also be worthless. It all depends on where you invest it in. Although, unlike money, I find it hard to believe that all memories have a zero return on investment. I say this because while whatever knowledge you get from an experience may not have been worth the trouble, it's still knowledge at the end of the day and as they say, no knowledge is a waste.

But come to think of it, you definitely can get a negative return on investment from an experience. Trauma, faulty conclusions. unknown biases, destructive patterns. All of these can come from one experience. It can also cascade as one bad experience creates decisions that create more bad experiences and then you constantly generate self fulfilling prophecies.

So what is the compounding effect of a memory? I don’t know. But I can make a few guesses as to the direction it may take. The low hanging fruits are good (or bad) feelings. But we also have things like its influence on your decision making, easy empathy, a broader world view and a more open mind. Also, a deeper pool of experience to form opinions on. Becoming a happier and more fulfilled person could also be on the table. And a bonus could be being a more interesting person to have conversations with.

Each of the examples I listed have compounding effects in their own right. Let's take formed opinions for instance. Your mental models on how you see the world are based on your experiences. How you see the world influences what you think is possible. What you think is possible influences the decisions you make. The decisions you make influence the direction of your life. And so on and so forth.

But it's one of those things you can only truly see in hindsight.

It’s a scary thought. Doing things and not really being able to plot the exact outcome. Not being able to reduce them to simple math and equations. I guess that’s also why it’s best to focus more on being and doing. That’s where a lot of fulfilment actually is anyway. Not the destination.

The same way you can start seeing the effects of compounding in a few years in may be similar here. Not having to live out decades to understand why and being able to see the benefits of your experiences earlier. It's a dynamic thing. You may experience something today that you thank yourself for in five years. You may also experience something and completely forget it till you're 60 when you're babysitting children and telling them stories from the life you've lived..

What’s the price of a memory? I don’t think we’d ever really know until years have passed and we look back at experiences and no longer see the dollar or naira cost but what we felt and what it made us do or become as a result. And so long as you don’t do anything crazy like splurge your rent on an experience, I don’t think you’d really remember the zeros.

And you shouldn't have to.

That's all for now. Hope you enjoyed it.

See you in the next post!