📸 The 20th Century Memory Theory: Why I Might Already Be Eternal
by Michael Duong
What if I told you I might already be immortal?
No, I’m not banking on cryogenics or uploading my brain to the blockchain (yet). I’m talking about something much simpler—something you’re doing every day without realizing it.
I call it the 20th Century Memory Theory. And if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re living it too.
🧠TL;DR: We Outsourced Memory—and It Changed Everything
Our generation isn’t the first to remember. But we are the first to remember in high-definition, timestamped, geotagged, and backed up to the cloud.
And that changes what it means to be human.
Let me explain.
đź“ś Before Photos, Memories Died with Us
Imagine being alive in 1820. Your happiest moments—the way your lover looked at you, the laughter of your child, the curve of a mountain on your favorite walk—were yours and yours alone.
When you died, they went with you.
Sure, you could try to capture them in writing or art. Maybe your great-grandkids would read your journals. But your lived experience? Gone.
Now? I can pull up a photo from 2014 and relive an entire summer in 3 seconds.
📱 Swipe to Time Travel
With one swipe of my finger, I can feel it all again:
- The way my newborn daughter gripped my finger for the first time.
- The exact sunlight hitting the Pacific as I proposed to my wife.
- That blurry, neon-soaked night in Newport Beach with my best friends and too many Heineken beers/Tequila shots.
This isn’t just nostalgia. It’s memory—on demand.
And that’s wild.
🧬 Memory is Identity. And Identity is Now External
If our sense of self is built on memories…
…and our memories are stored on devices…
Then a part of us lives outside of us.
Think about that for a second.
Your photos don’t just help you remember.
They help you become.
They’re the hard drive to your human operating system.
And every time you back them up, you’re not just saving space—you’re saving your soul.
👵 A Generational Divide in Memory
My grandfather had maybe five childhood photos.
I have 5,000 from just last year.
When he wanted to remember his first job, he had to sit still and close his eyes. How many details did he forget? What was the name of his boss, again? What was the haircolor of the cute girl he met on his first day. Was it raining or sunny?
Me? I search my iCloud and boom—there’s me, age 17, working retail at Holister to make some gas money to go surfing.
We’re not the same.
🧨 But Here’s the Catch…
There’s a cost to all this.
We’re so busy documenting our lives that sometimes we forget to live them.
You’ve felt it too, right?
- Taking a video of your kid’s school play instead of watching it.
- Recording a concert and realizing you didn’t really feel the music.
- Posting the perfect sunset… and then realizing you missed it.
We’re archivists of a present we’re not fully experiencing.
⚖️ So What Do We Do?
Here’s my answer:
Live first. Archive second.
Let the camera support the moment—not replace it.
Use your digital memory to connect with the past, not distract from the present.
Because when done right, your photo reel becomes more than data.
It becomes a living museum.
A legacy.
A way to whisper to your great-great-grandkids: “This was me. This is us.”
🧠Final Thought: You Might Already Be Eternal
If identity is memory, and memory now lives in the cloud…
…then maybe death isn’t the full stop it used to be.
Maybe you’re already eternal.
You just haven’t realized it yet.
Scroll wisely.
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