Let's do something to remember

Why do we engage in the practice of intentional memory creation?

It’s finals season again, which means it’s time to talk about televised sitcoms. This time I’m thinking about one of my favourite shows of recent years, Modern Family. Specifically, I want to talk about season 3, episode 20, titled “The Last Walt”. In this episode, Claire and Phil’s elderly neighbour passes away, causing Phil to reflect on the memories of special times he shared with each of his children that they will have after he’s gone. He realizes that he has no special moments with his middle child, Alex, so he sets out to create a memory for her. In true sit-come fashion, each of his attempts to do something special fails. At the end of the episode, Alex tells Phil that he has given her a special memory - the time her dad drove her around doing all kinds of crazy things, trying to provide her with a day to remember. 

This idea - doing something to intentionally create a memory exists not only on television. Whether it’s taking your child to a movie theatre for the first time, going on a trip, or orchestrating a specific moment that we want to have lived or want to experience with someone, we engage in intentional memory creation all the time. Sometimes, of course, this works. In Venice, on the last morning of a family trip to Italy when I was 17, my dad and I woke up early and went to the Doge’s Palace so that we would be able to say we had been there. We were the only people there other than the staff, and it’s one of my fondest memories from that trip - this thing we set out to do with so much intention. But equally, if not more, dear to me, is a few nights earlier when we tried to lose my brother down the dark, winding alleys of the city. 

Why do we engage in this practice of intentional memory creation? Why do we place so much value in setting out to have these specific, sometimes almost arbitrary experiences hoping that they will be the ones we remember later? 

In “The Last Walt”, Phil takes Alex on a sort of road trip, stopping to do things for the sole purpose of creating a memory with her. The episode reminds me of being almost-18 in Manhatten and putting on a little black dress to stand outside Tiffany’s eating a bagel, trying to create a special moment for myself that I would remember. It’s almost like an exercise in memory planning. However, the problem with doing this is that it creates a sort of sort of out-of-body experience. I don’t look back on the morning full of nostalgia because I was so aware of what I was doing, even at the time, that I didn’t enjoy it. This is one of the pitfalls of orchestrating the moments we want to remember. 

Despite living in a time that seems to be constantly pushing for advancement, it is also an incredibly nostalgic era - something I’m reminded of every time I see a high school student dressed like it’s 2001, despite having been born in 2003 at the earliest. We are constantly prompted to be nostalgic about our lives. Multiple times a week, Facebook encourages me to view and share posts and photos from that week seven years earlier. As we approach the end of the year, we will start seeing “top nine” posts on Instagram, recalling things that happened only a few months ago. Spotify has already released their “wrapped” playlist, encouraging you to re-live your year in tuning out car horns and relatives. These social media strategies reinforce the idea that we should be doing things to create intentional memories and that there are specific experiences we should aim to have so we can remember them later. 

It is logical to want special moments with our family, friends, and significant others that we can look back on and talk about. But when Alex tells Phil that the thing she will remember from their day is not any of the experiences that he tried to fabricate for them to share, but instead that they drove around while he tried to create a memory for her, says a lot about the nature of doing something with the express purpose of creating a memory. So often, the things we remember, even from days where we set out to make memories, aren’t the things we had planned to remember beforehand.

An easy answer to the intentional memory phenomenon is that we want our lives to look like our Pinterest boards. But that seems far too simplistic. For all of time, humans have been incredibly concerned with preservation - with ensuring that something remains, somewhere, for us to be remembered by. When we decide that we are going to do something for the sole purpose of remembering it or others remembering us doing it, we are engaging in the act of preservation. Even when it doesn’t work, what we are doing with intentional memory creation seems to be almost fundamental to our human experience. We are creating a living archive of ourselves in the minds of others.  

I have spent countless hours and days doing things so that I will have memories of having done them or so that I will have a shared memory of having done something with a specific person. I have likely forgotten more of these attempts than I can remember. Going into the holiday season, I will undoubtedly attempt to create special memories for myself with my family and my family with me. Many of us probably will. So we should learn a lesson from Phil and Alex as we create our living archives. 

Phil is so concerned with making a special memory for his daughter that he misses the value of their shared experience. Alex isn’t concerned with having a specific special memory with her father, and so she walks away with a very strange day that she can look back on as a shared experience. It is nearly impossible to accurately predict which experiences will stand out to us upon reflection, and devoting too much time to attempting to do so can impede making the memories that will be the most valuable to us down the road. 

There is nothing wrong with creating intentional memories; these efforts can take us to beautiful places and exciting experiences. But when we become so focused on having a picture-perfect moment that we don’t enjoy the picture, we are not creating a moment that will live on for ourselves or the person with whom we are sharing it. Absolutely, we should continue to develop experiences to share with our family and friends. Still, perhaps we should focus more on sharing the experience and less on creating the perfect memory.