Everyone Just Wants to Forget: The Power of Collective Amnesia
Most people are more than willing to forget the past, along with its important lessons.
We all have things we want to forget.
Maybe it's a bad date. Maybe it's an abusive childhood. Maybe it's a year spent locked up in your house, thinking about death.
Maybe it's all three.
Some of us do a balancing act between forgetting and remembering. In order to get through the day, I have to forget my teen years, and a lot of my 20s too. We're talking about things that left me choking back tears in front of police officers, or lying to social workers when I got called out of class to answer squirmy questions. But I also have to remember. All those painful memories contain valuable lessons. They contain the baseline code of who I am.
I force myself to relive them.
Pain is a great teacher.
Those memories often explain why you feel sad or angry for no apparent reason, or why you do things that don't make sense on the surface.
A lot of people don't see the world like that. They just want to forget. They think it'll make them happy. They want to pretend the past never happened, especially…