by Meik Wiking
These pictures remind me of some of the happiest moments in my life. I realize that maybe this is why I enjoy photography so much—it’s the same reason I enjoy being a happiness researcher. My job is to make the unmeasurable measurable. In my spare time, I have tried to preserve the unpreservable. My work and my hobby are both attempts to capture this elusive thing we call happiness. To ask time to freeze. To allow us to savour those moments when all felt right in the world. It has been an attempt to preserve happiness for that 1/250th of a second.
Steve Allen/Shutterstock
And I am not alone. When we asked people in our Happy Memory Study why they remembered a specific memory, 7 percent said that they had some sort of memento from the event—for instance, a photograph. Each year, humans take more than a trillion photos. A trillion is a thousand billion—I had to look it up. It is no wonder that we sometimes feel that we are drowning in snapshots of other people’s lives. I think the number is best visualized by an exhibition by Dutch artist Erik Kessels in which he printed out 350,000 photographs from Flickr—the number shared in one day—and placed them in a gallery.
dpa picture alliance archive/Alamy Stock Photo
7% of people in the Happy Memory Study remembered their happy memory by using a memento
Humans take more than a trillion photos a year
Most of our photos these days remain in the cloud, on drives, inside apps or on social media and never make it into print. Browsing old school photo albums has been almost completely replaced by scrolling through Instagram and Facebook.
On Thursdays and Fridays, my feed is flooded with #tbt and #fbf—also known as Throwback Thursdays and Flashback Fridays. Taking it one step further is Timehop, described as #tbt every day. Here, users’ social media posts and pictures from the same day from several years are pulled together in a time capsule that can be shared with others. Timehop’s motto is “Celebrate your best memories every day” and their goal is to reinvent reminiscing and help people find new ways to connect with each other around the past.
The fact that we are outsourcing our memory to the internet makes things even more complicated. The Instagram generation are not only their own PR managers; they are also architects of their future memories. However, we also risk digital amnesia through losing our precious photographs and messages along with our phone or laptop. Studies also show that, if we think we can re-find a fact online later, we are less likely to commit it to memory in the first place.
One study by Ian Robertson, a professor of neuropsychology based at Trinity College Dublin, conducted with 3,000 Britons found that a third of those under the age of thirty were unable to recall their telephone number without using their phone. The study was published in 2007 and we certainly haven’t become less dependent on our devices since then.
Westend61/Getty Images
HAPPY MEMORY TIP:
YOUR OWN PERSONAL GLIMPSES OF HAPPINESS
Consider having a private social media account as a memory bank.
Your social media account can be great for a trip down memory lane. Your photos, videos and thoughts in chronological order—a mixed-media memoir of sorts. The trouble is, you might edit out anything that is not suitable for Instagram. The debate on curation versus authenticity is ongoing, as people often find that Instagram is one long feed of picture-perfect curated lives. Personally, I try to balance highlights with the everyday and ask people to note that “Photos posted on my Instagram and Facebook are highlights from my life and not my usual life. Most days are spent spilling coffee, installing software and looking for my keys.” In addition, there are a lot of things that mean a lot to me but are completely irrelevant to people I am connected with online.
One solution could be to create a private account for whenever you want to take a stroll down memory lane—a museum for your memories of the everyday. You may find it quite liberating to snap and post photos that are for your eyes only. No need to worry about the right filter, lighting or caption.
Instead of being the curator of how other people see you, try to be the curator of how your future self can look back. When your future self would like to take a walk down memory lane, what are the things they would like to see?
It means taking pictures of your everyday life. Of everyday objects that might not seem memorable now but will be immensely fun to look at twenty, thirty or forty years from now. The background in some of the pictures from my childhood in the eighties and nineties yields curiosities like rotary-dial phones, enormous computers and deep-pan TVs.
LIFE LOGGING—THE ERA OF TOTAL RECALL AND DIGITAL AMNESIA
Imagine you could pull out an archive for any day in your life and re-experience that day. What you did. Who you met. What you ate for lunch.
Would you like that power? Sure, it would be nice to re-watch your wedding, parties and accomplishments—and find out exactly where you stepped in that thing you brought on to the carpet of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—but maybe there are plenty of things we would rather forget.
But if you are Gordon Bell, you have the opportunity to travel in time. In 1998, Gordon Bell, a researcher at Microsoft, began collecting as much digital information about his life as possible. Bell also headed a research experiment named MyLifeBits at Microsoft—a foundation for the modern version of the Quantified Self movement and fitness trackers such as Fitbit. Think of him as a more systematic and digital version of Andy Warhol.
Photographs and videos went into a searchable archive of Bell’s memories—but also his heart rate, temperature, emails he received and websites he visited. The MyLifeBits project includes more than 1,000 videos, more than 5,000 sound files, including conversations, tens of thousands of photographs, more than 100,000 emails, every text-message exchange and every webpage he has visited. Gordon Bell wrote a book about the whole thing: Total Recall. Great title.
Gordon might be extreme, but he is not alone. People around the world are keeping photo journals, counting their steps and logging their lives.
Furthermore, life logging is not a new thing. We used to call it keeping a diary. But a new breed of apps and gadgets is taking it to a new level of details and vividness. A wide selection of life-logging cameras capture moments throughout the day.
Some are worn around the neck and can shoot up to 2,000 photos per day, while others shoot two photos a minute and tag where they were taken using a built-in GPS.
Through our devices and social media accounts, we store mountains of details from our lives, but we never seem to organize them. As I see it, the problem is not the lack of collecting but the lack of curating and preserving.
Our digital libraries are a total mess. We store photos—but we seldom see them. We get crushed under our own big data. To make matters worse, we not only suffer from this photo fatigue but also risk digital amnesia. Because, contrary to what many people think, digital records are often more difficult to preserve than traditional print records.
Twelve years ago I attended a wedding in Siena. It was stunning. There were ladies in big hats and gentlemen in flax suits. We spent a week there in a villa outside the town, having dinner at long tables and going for walks in the hills.
I must have taken a thousand pictures that week. They are all gone. I am not sure when or how. They were on a camera. They were on a computer. One was stolen. One broke down. One hundred years after the lost generation, we see a generation of lost memories.
That is a real contrast to the experience I had this year with old school photographs. The photo albums I had not seen in twenty years were still there. Faded, yes. Cropped faces, yes. But they were there. I have now started to print out the digital shots recording the moments that are most meaningful to me.
Tommaso Altamura/Alamy Stock Photo
MEMORY—THE ARTIST
We share stories with our loved ones. We share memories and we pass memories back and forth. Outsource them. Lend them out. Borrow them. In the process, they are polished and altered.
In 1985, my
family and I were on holiday in what was then Yugoslavia. We drove there from Denmark and it took two days. We had one cassette tape. Whitney Houston wanted to dance with somebody all the way across Europe.
During the trip, we visited a stud farm. I think they bred racehorses. However, they also had a small donkey there and we—my brother and I—got to ride it. It was stubborn and lazy and preferred to eat grass instead of walking around with tourists on its back. I have a vivid memory of that donkey and can still feel its coarse hair.
Thirty years later, I was going through the old photo album—the album I hadn’t seen in twenty years. It turned out there was no donkey. It was a small white horse. I had a clear memory of riding on a donkey—but here was clear evidence that my memory was false.
In Danish, as in many other cultures, a donkey is thought of as stubborn. You can be “as stubborn as a donkey.” What is likely to have happened is that the story of the stubborn horse that was told in our family had over the years morphed the horse into a donkey because of semantics and our faulty memories.
Memory is not only the museum curator—it is also the artist. It not only chooses pieces of art to exhibit but also paints them and paints over them. Sometimes, it is like the Impressionists, sometimes like the Expressionists, and sometimes like Dalí on LSD.
Westend61/Getty Images
People mistakenly think of memory as being like a camera or a filing cabinet. If you want to remember something, you can search for the file and look it up. But that is not how memories work. A memory is not a thing, it is a process. Memories are mental constructions, re-created in the here and now, based on what your demands of the present are. When you piece the details together, some belong to the event itself and some may have been added later. There is no mental YouTube where your experiences are stored in perfect condition and can be replayed in the original version. Every time you play it, you alter it a little bit.
“Do you remember getting lost in the shopping center?”
“No, I don’t think so,” you say.
“Here is the description of the event your parents gave us,” says the researcher conducting the experiment, and she passes you a piece of paper. You read their story of the event. You were three at the time. You got separated from your parents in the busy shopping centre but an old lady saw you crying and helped you.
“Do you remember that? Do you remember how you felt?”
You think for a moment. “I was scared,” you say. “I couldn’t see my parents.”
“What did you do?”
“I think the nice old lady helped me—and then they called my parents over the PA.”
“Can you remember what she looked like?”
“I don’t know—I think maybe she had glasses. And a green dress.”
Here’s Elizabeth Loftus again, with another study on faulty memory. She and her colleagues presented twenty-four participants with four stories from when they were between four and six years old. The participants thought the experiment was about their ability to recall details of their childhood memories. That was a lie. It was a study examining the possibility of implanting false memories.
Three of the four stories the participants were presented with were true—the researchers had interviewed their relatives. But one of the four stories was false: the lost-in-the-shopping-center memory. It seemed a likely story—the researchers asked the relatives which shopping center they used to go to—but the relatives had also confirmed that the event had in fact never happened.
Soon afterwards, the participants were interviewed. At this point, they were reminded about the four memories and asked to recall as much as they could about them. At a second interview a week later, a similar procedure was followed. At the end of both interviews participants rated the clarity of their memories.
At the end of the experiment it was revealed to the participants that one of the memories was false and they were asked which one they thought it was. Of the twenty-four, five did not pick the lost-in-the-shopping-center memory and so believed it was a real memory.
Meik Wiking
INSTAGRAM MEMORIES
At the time of writing, there are more than 8 million posts on Instagram with the hashtag #makingmemories and more than 70 million just with #memories. There are also more than 17,000 posts with #memoriess, so even people who can’t remember how “memories” is spelled post about them.
At the Happiness Research Institute, we ran an analysis of Instagram posts with the #makingmemories hashtag. We randomized the photos we selected to make sure we did not have time-zone biases or seasonal biases and we excluded photos posted by companies or which had a commercial purpose. However, the analysis does include a language bias, as we only included posts in English. So if we ran the study in Danish or Russian, it might look different.
So, what are people doing when they say they are making memories? Well, the analysis shows that the memories people post with the #makingmemories hashtag fall into roughly four categories.
First, there is the #momlife-dadlife-familylife category. Kids being cute. Kids playing in the snow. Kids making a mess in the kitchen. The carved pumpkins, the Christmas trees and the trip to Disneyland. Second, there is the #SassyPOTD (Post of the Day) category. Girls’ night out. Boys’ night out. Friendships, BBFs and squad goals. Cocktails and shots and things that seemed like a good idea at the time. Third, there is the #Love category. Weddings and anniversaries. Getaways and long weekends. Couples smiling at the camera. Also known as the “look what I’ve caught” category. But the lion’s share of posts falls into the fourth category—the #Wanderlust category. The holidays. The discoveries. The adventures.
It is the mountains we climbed, the cities we explored and the sunsets we chased. New Zealand, New York and new horizons. Memories are made when our wanderlust is unleashed. When we’re travelers. When we’re explorers. When we’re adventurers.
Waitforlight/Getty Images
Memories are made when we tread in the footsteps of the David Livingstones, the Marco Polos and the Vasco da Gamas. When we set sail, take off or lace up our hiking boots. When we hunt for treasure—and that treasure is a memorable life.
Making memories is to embrace the travel-often mantra. You can always make money—you can’t always make memories.
HAPPY MEMORY TIP:
HAPPY WHIFF LISTS, SOUNDTRACKS, DATA POINTS
Get creative with outsourcing.
Outsourcing your memory does not have to be done via photographs. If you have kids, you may also get them to draw a happy memory of something you experienced together. If they have a talent for music or rhymes, they may enjoy writing a song. Or do as my wonderful editor, Emily, does, and create a playlist on Spotify for each month. She has done this for the past few years and enjoys listening back to a random month.
Since all our senses can trigger memories, you may want to go Warhol on the scent front and create a happy whiff list. Pair scents with happy memories. One woman I spoke to recently bought a special perfume for her wedding and wore it only on her wedding day. What I have also started to do is to record sounds from moments where I have been happy. I have recordings of the waves hitting the rocks on Bornholm, the wind in the leaves from a tree in former royal hunting grounds north of Copenhagen and the sound of the wind in the wires of sailboats in Split harbour in Croatia.
Or you may want to take your lead and inspiration from Alejandro Cencerrado Rubio. He is one of my amazing colleagues at the Happiness Research Institute and works as a data analyst.
Alejandro loves big data sets and he is responsible for a lot of the exciting findings that come out of the Happiness Research Institute. In fact, when it comes to finding happiness, I think we are all searching for the same things: we all want to find somebody who looks at us the way Alejandro looks at data.
In addition, for more than thirteen years Alejandro has been collecting his own happiness data. Every day, he records a happiness score from 1 to 10. Has this day been a good day? What have
I been doing? How happy have I felt? Would I like to repeat this day another day?
Here’s his entry from 25 February 2017, a Saturday:
Today I’m in one of those days that give meaning to life. I’ve come from being with Mamen, our first date, and I know she’s the girl I’ll be with for a long time. I know it by the way she laughed, by how she looked at me, by how the conversation flowed. I am at home with the rain bumping into the glass, in the loneliness that has been chasing me for so many years, and to think that out there is someone who can get me out of this loneliness makes me feel something special, as if the lonely Alex who has lived here up to now is something from the past. The scenes that remain in my memory, with the candlelight reflecting in her eyes, looking at me, totally focused on them. I couldn’t tell if I spoke loudly or lazily, if someone looked at us, because I only had my mind on the conversation, not believing a girl like that could like me at all, but knowing that her gestures were obvious; what a pity not to be able to transmit emotions like those of today with a few words, but how real and genuine it is, that only a few times in life you can experience something like this, the casual union of two people who understand each other and like each other without doubt. I don’t know how to name what I am feeling, I think I’ll call it illusion, it’s not happiness, because I still don’t know if she likes me, if I’m someone for her, but it’s a promise of happiness, a promise to stop being alone, of not having to look for more. As a detail, it surprises me that photos of landscapes that I don’t usually find very striking, today I look at them with a special sense. I imagine myself there with Mamen, embraced, united, fused, loving. Thunder seems to me to have so much beauty, it is impressive the sense that a single date with a girl that I like and pay attention to gives life.