Photos, journalist, audio recordings, video, blogging, printing photos, making music, posting online etc...
How do you record certain events? Make a journal entry? Just keep it in your memory to yourself?
How do you trust you wont forget the small details that you know today?
How do you trust the security of your documented life? your journal, your printed photos?
You you like analogue or digital documentation? Do you store data on HHDs? (they have a ~30 year lifespan) Mdisk? Photos? Pen and Paper?
Childhood memories? How do you view these archives?
Do you even believe in documenting the events of your life? Is it important to you? The quicker you write down an event, the more emotion you can convey.
What do you do and don't do?
I never thought about it much but this post sparked the process so here it goes:
My family became poor when I was around 4; I've got quite a lot of photos from before then (early 90s), which was our main/only way of documenting life events. The price of a photo film and the film processing services resulted in our family abandoning the medium and throughout most of my childhood/adolescent life, the idea of documenting my life didn't "ingrain" in me. I also never "got" the purpose of making journals, which I found as a time wasted, since I didn't think there was anything worth documenting.
At some point, everybody got their phones with digital cameras and at a later point I got mine too, but it was always the low-end model with the "potato-lens" which discouraged me from using it, especially when in groups where anyone could take better photos with their superior cameras.
I've tried using calendars and notebooks at some point to put my life in an order of some sorts (mostly for keeping dates, not journaling per se) but couldn't remember to keep them on person and use them consistently. (Got diagnosed with AD[H]D as an adult a couple of years ago so it kinda tracks)
I also never had the drive to post my own stuff on social media (so in my teenage years, instead of posting photos or writing stuff, I ususally just put links to songs I liked on youtube). There was an urge to post since "everybody did that" but it was hard for me to convince myself that whatever I wanted to post was "good enough".
Now, in my adult life, I've noticed at some point that I don't have that "trigger" that would make me pull out my phone to document events in my life or write down my thoughts on matters. Most photos I have in my camera roll (and stored on hard drives) are either some documents or things I needed to refer to during some work. Meeting my wife has changed that a bit; I've got much more photos of us together since I've met her, but the aforementioned trigger isn't there in me anyway.
I've got my childhood photos stored in a small envelope. Whatever photos/videos I took since my first phone with camera are stored both in a cloud and on a couple of HDDs. I don't find myself going back to them, though. If I ever do, it's because I'm searching for something specific and have to sift through the stuff.
Writing a post/comment like this is something rare for me and gotta say I didn't do it for a long time. Thanks for the inspiration.
This was a lovely post to read. I didn't respond when I first saw this thread because I didn't know how to answer it. My answer would have looked a lot like yours. Thanks for writing it.