The phone is cold in my hand, a useless rectangle of glass and metal reflecting a hostile sun. The autofocus breathes in and out, a frantic, digital pulse hunting for a subject that isn’t there anymore. It finally locks onto a leaf, tack sharp, while the thing I was trying to save, the real reason for lifting the camera, has already dissolved back into the ordinary flow of time. All I have is the ghost of an intention and the lingering heat of frustration in my chest. A perfect, 4K recording of the wrong thing. It’s a feeling I’m getting used to.

We’ve been tricked into believing we are curators of our own lives. We are told to capture everything, to log it, tag it, and file it away in the digital attic of the cloud. Every laugh, every sunset, every decent-looking meal becomes a candidate for the permanent collection. We’ve become archivists, and the sheer volume of our collections is suffocating. We have 9,999 photos we will never scroll back to, hundreds of gigabytes of video we will never edit, notes apps filled with disconnected thoughts that have no context. It’s a tax on the present moment. Each time we pull out the phone, we pay a little bit of our lived experience to the archive, hoping the record will be worth more than the life it displaced.

Just this morning, I pulled on a pair of jeans I hadn’t worn in a year and found a folded-up $20 bill in the pocket. The feeling was electric-a small, pure jolt of unexpected luck. There was no photo of that $20 bill. No note-to-self about its existence. It was a genuine discovery, an analog surprise in a digitally predictable world. That feeling of finding something real and unrecorded felt more substantial than reviewing a thousand perfectly captured memories.

For years, I believed the opposite. I was convinced that the problem wasn’t the archiving, but the inefficiency of the tools. I once spent 49 consecutive hours trying to write a script to organize my digital life. The goal was to have every photo automatically tagged with geolocation, weather data, and even a rudimentary emotional analysis of the faces in it. I wanted a searchable, sortable, perfect database of my own past. The project was a catastrophic failure. It produced a sterile, lifeless ledger. It told me where I was, but not who I was. It was a timeline without a soul.

I used to think people like Carlos J.-M. were relics. Carlos is a court sketch artist, one of the few left. He sits in federal courthouses where cameras are forbidden and captures the human drama with nothing more than textured paper and a set of soft pastels. His work is, by any photographic standard, inaccurate. He doesn’t capture every pore or eyelash. He captures the clench of a jaw, the slump of a defeated shoulder, the flicker of arrogance in a defendant’s eyes during a key piece of testimony. He translates emotion into form, a process that is inherently subjective and beautifully flawed.

I saw him working once, a whirlwind of focused energy. He had maybe 9 minutes to capture the essence of a witness’s testimony. His hands, stained with colored dust, moved with a certainty that had nothing to do with technical precision. He was listening not just to the words but to the spaces between them. He was documenting the feeling in the room, a thing no camera can ever truly record. Later, I saw the finished sketch. The witness’s nose was maybe a little too sharp, the courtroom lighting not quite right. But the look in the eyes-a sticktail of fear and defiance-was more real than any photograph could ever be. It was the truth, if not the fact.

That was the turning point. I realized my 49-hour data project was a fool’s errand. I was trying to build a perfect mirror when what I needed was a portrait. I was so focused on the technical details of my own past that I’d lost the emotional thread. I needed to get out of my own head, away from the sterile silence of my screen. My first instinct was to find a quiet library, but even that felt too structured. The search for places to work remotely led me instead to a noisy, chaotic coffee shop a few towns over. The ambient clatter of plates and the low murmur of 29 different conversations should have been distracting. Instead, it was liberating. The mess of human interaction around me was a perfect counterpoint to the sterile order I had been trying to impose on my own life. The solution wasn’t better organization; it was embracing a little bit of chaos.

We are not our own archivists.

– A Core Revelation

Our brains understand this intuitively. Forgetting is a biological feature, not a bug. It’s the mechanism that sands down the sharp edges of trauma, that allows grudges to fade, that lets us construct a coherent narrative of our lives without being drowned in the noise of every single detail. We remember the emotional peak of the vacation, not the 9 hours of airport layovers. We remember the lesson from the mistake, not the gut-wrenching shame of the moment it happened. This curated, subjective memory is the bedrock of our identity.

I’ve read about people with hyperthymesia, the inability to forget. They can recall the details of any given day of their lives. For most of them, it’s not a superpower; it’s a prison. They are haunted by every mistake, every awkward conversation, every moment of pain, all replaying with perfect fidelity. A flawed memory is a compassionate memory. A study of 239 individuals with varying memory capabilities found that life satisfaction had a much stronger correlation with a positive narrative construction of the past than with objective recall accuracy. We are our stories, not our data logs.

And I have to admit, I made the classic mistake. I learned this lesson the hard way. A few years ago, at my son’s soccer game, I was so determined to get the perfect video of him scoring. I was fumbling with the digital zoom, trying to get it just right, cursing the glare on the screen. I heard the roar of the other parents and looked up from my phone just in time to see him running back to his side of the field, arms in the air. I had missed it. The actual moment. I have 19 seconds of blurry green grass and the faint sound of a distant cheer. I have the digital proof that I was there, but I don’t have the memory. I was so busy trying to save the experience that I forgot to have it.

Now, I try to think more like Carlos. I try to focus on the impression. What does this moment feel like? What is the one detail that holds all the emotion? Sometimes I get it wrong. My memories are full of misremembered colors and condensed timelines. They are factually incorrect and emotionally true. They are gloriously, stubbornly inaccurate. And I wouldn’t trade them for a petabyte of perfect recordings.