The more I learn about AI token management and context windows, the more I think about human memory and aging.
I spend a lot of time working with AI. At the end of an afternoon, I'll often ask it to summarize everything we've done into a Markdown file. Hours of conversation, experiments, arguments and corrections become two or three pages.
The next day, I can pick up where I left off.
What matters isn't the record of everything we said. It's the judgments we reached, the decisions we made, and the questions we haven't answered.
That's compression. And I suspect it's something human memory is supposed to be very good at.
I'm in my mid-fifties. I don't need to remember my childhood in its entirety. I need a few important moments, the lessons I learned, and whatever those experiences contributed to the person I am today.
Forgetting isn't necessarily a defect. It may be an essential part of moving forward.
But we've built a world increasingly hostile to forgetting.
I have thousands of photographs of my children doing absolutely nothing. I have photographs of meals, holidays, concerts and things I wanted to show someone once. My Google Photos account is full of screenshots I took to ask an AI a question or remember something for fifteen minutes.
None of those screenshots was intended to become part of my permanent personal history. Yet there they are, backed up alongside my wedding photographs.
Once upon a time, photographs occupied physical space. Even the uncle who took a thousand pictures eventually had to throw some away.
Wedding pictures stayed. The third trip to Myrtle Beach went, except perhaps for the photograph of Grandpa slipping.
That wasn't just a storage decision. It was editing.
Today we don't edit. We accumulate.
And for what?
Nobody wants to see seventeen photographs of my crown roast. I make one every year, and sometimes I want to show someone. But that's my desire. They probably got everything they needed from hearing the words "crown roast." If they need a picture, Google has thousands.
The same is true of most vacation photographs. People care about us. That doesn't mean they want to examine the evidence that we've been somewhere.
Worse, we now interrupt experiences to preserve them.
Watch people at a concert holding up their phones. They're spending part of the evening documenting an experience they paid to have, creating recordings they'll probably never watch.
There is a counterargument. Digital archives allow us to forget because we know we can retrieve the information later. That's genuinely useful. I don't need to remember the details of a meeting when I have the transcript.
But that makes the distinction even more important. An archive should free us from remembering, not demand that we spend our lives creating and revisiting it.
My mother died a few years ago. I've forgotten a surprising amount about exactly how she looked. Not everything, of course, but details have faded.
It hasn't diminished my love for her in the slightest.
What remains is what she meant to me, what she taught me, and the ways she shaped my life.
That's not a corrupted version of the memory. It's what matters about it.
And I wonder whether nostalgia becomes more troublesome as we age precisely because we have so much context available. We keep comparing the present with a past that no longer exists. Technology gives us endless opportunities to reopen that comparison.
But the world isn't going to return to the way it was because I preferred something about it thirty years ago.
I need to live in the world that exists now.
Working with AI has taught me something about managing context: carrying everything forward isn't intelligence. Selecting what deserves to survive is.
Perhaps we should apply the same principle to our own lives.
A life well remembered isn't necessarily a life well lived.