How to forget your memories

If you have some memories that you’d rather forget, you can simply do so. This post will say how I did it.

My background: Years ago, (somehow, I still remember this, but obviously can’t be sure when precisely) I used to struggle with randomly recalling very embarrassing memories. Whenever I recalled one, this had a strong effect on me. It distracted me from what I was doing, it ruined my day, I kept mulling them over pointlessly. Then somehow I had the idea of making a focused effort to not think of them anymore.

How to do it: The way to do this is simply to notice whenever you’re about to think of those memories, and instead try to think of something else very fast. Obviously you shouldn’t try to not think of the memories, that’s like trying not to think of a pink elephant, which I bet you just did. No, actually change the subject, fast. Look for a specific thing as fast as you can, and think as deeply as you can about that thing.

Tips of things to think of: Memories can come to you anywhere. It’s great if you can always have some sort of very interesting content related to your personal interests that you can come back to instantly to get away from the memories, but personally I find it impossible to carry any such content everywhere. Besides, even when you’re looking at your favorite book, you might be currently at a not-so-great passage which isn’t good enough to distract you from the memories that you were about to think of. So what I recommend is to try to focus very hard on the first thing that you do see in the environment you’re currently in. (Or if that was what brought up the memories, some other thing. But if you have objects that reliably make you remember bad memories, consider getting rid of those objects.) For me, at least, the first thing I see around me is usually whatever furniture is in the room I’m currently in. If you go outside more than I do, then it might be other things, such as streets and buildings and trees. Try to think very hard about the thing you’re looking at from a new perspective, such as for instance: how it was physically built, the materials that it’s made of, its history, depictions of it in art, the types of activities that it’s used for, its geometrical shape and features, its deep metaphysical nature. Think very intensely about that, and if you stop being able to think of more stuff about that thing, then look around yourself harder for a second thing. If you apply yourself enough to this activity, you will hopefully forget which memory it was that you were about to remember, and be unable to come back to it.

Why this works: This works because it is the opposite principle to spaced repetition. Whenever you recall memories, this reinforces them, so what you need to do if you want to kill some memories is to prevent them being recalled.

Caveats: Memories are associated to other memories. Sometimes, you know recalling a good memory from your past will quickly remind you of a bad one. There’s no way to keep the good ones without the bad ones in that case, you have to kill the entire network. As a result of what I did, I basically cannot recall any of my past from before about 2017, when I turned 18 and got into college. I cannot remember anything about my school friends, or earlier online friends, even if I try.

Nowadays, I feel like I have grown as a person to the extent that I am very emotionally resilient, and I could definitely simply deal with the memories if somehow I got them all back now. But they’re gone, I can’t get them back. In order to be able to tell people about my life more accurately, I have made a deliberate effort to reconstruct my past from whatever physical or digital evidence I had left from back then, which wasn’t that much, since I had wisely gotten rid of most of it. But there are a lot of things I simply don’t know.

I’m glad I did what I did. The memories were holding me back. They were actively preventing me from achieving the personal growth which I did achieve, over the years since I lost them.

It helps that the cut-off point, 2017, is also when I began losing interest in childish pastimes such as video games, and began getting more interested in intellectual matters of various sorts. I began reading a lot of serious nonfiction, which I had more or less never done before. The person I had been before had more or less nothing to contribute to developing the person I became.