I Can't Picture My Kids
On the strange mercy of forgetting — and why our machines need to learn it too.
You delete a photo, but it’s still in the cloud. You unfollow someone, but their face still shows up in “People You May Know.” You move on; your feed does not.
Forgetting used to be one of the brain’s greatest tricks. We evolved to let things fade — to prune connections so we could stay adaptive. Forgetting isn’t failure; it’s intelligence. Neuroscientists describe how the brain actively discards irrelevant details so new patterns can emerge. Without that pruning, the mind would collapse under its own weight.
You don’t need to remember the name of the kid who sat three seats down from you in second grade. Your brain lets that go so it can make room for what matters now.
I’ve learned this in a personal way. Not long ago, I discovered that I have aphantasia — I literally can’t picture things in my mind’s eye (aphantasia.com). If you asked me to describe people closest to me — my children, my partner, my siblings, my mother — I could only give you a few data points: hair color, maybe eye color. I couldn’t tell you if they have a big chin or a small nose. I can’t “see” them.
This forced forgetting means I’m far less prone to reliving trauma. Vivid imagery can anchor pain; without it, I move on more easily. (Health.com)
It’s not ideal — there are losses. I have no true memories of my dad. I’m sometimes chided for being emotionally distant. But there’s freedom in it, too.
Psychologist Daniel Schacter at Harvard calls this transience — the natural fading of memory — one of the “seven sins of memory” that is, paradoxically, vital for identity. Forgetting isn’t an error; it’s the mind’s way of editing the story so it can keep going.
You are not a fixed archive of experiences but a living document under constant revision. Each act of forgetting makes space for reinterpretation. The fuzziness around old events isn’t decay — it’s authorship. It’s how the mind rewrites the self in real time.
If every version of you remained perfectly intact, you’d be crushed under the weight of your own history — every mistake, every humiliation, every past self demanding recognition. There’d be no space for evolution, only accumulation. Forgetting allows the narrative to cohere. It’s what lets you say I used to be that person instead of I still am.
Johnny Cash used to say, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”
He wasn’t celebrating dishonesty — he was acknowledging how memory works.
We remember in service of meaning, not accuracy. By blurring the edges, we shape experience into story, and story into self.
But when the record becomes immutable — when even our most minor moments are frozen forever online — we lose that creative latitude. We don’t allow the mind to sand down the details, to mythologize, to find pattern or grace. The stories that once circled up a dinner table, the gentle exaggerations that make a life coherent, get replaced by timestamps and receipts.
Without the freedom to forget, we lose our ability to forgive — both others and ourselves. We stay pinned to our worst day, unable to move past it or let anyone else do the same. Forgiveness requires blur; mercy needs soft focus.
But algorithms don’t forget. Every click, hesitation, or half-second linger becomes another fossilized fragment of you. Systems built for infinite recall mistake accumulation for wisdom. They don’t distinguish between curiosity and identity — between what caught your attention and what deserved it.
The result is a digital ecosystem haunted by versions of ourselves we’ve outgrown. A song you played once becomes a personality trait. An old search becomes a prophecy. Every scroll is an echo chamber of your former impulses. The machine can’t tell you’ve changed, because it doesn’t believe in change.
At scale, this becomes cultural rigor mortis. We live in a collective memory with no expiry date. Old tweets resurface like artifacts dredged from tar. A society that can’t forget is one that can’t forgive.
Europe saw this coming. In 2014, a Spanish man, Mario Costeja González, asked Google to stop linking to an article about his bankruptcy — he’d long since paid it, but the internet hadn’t moved on. That case birthed the right to be forgotten, later codified in the GDPR.
That law isn’t just about privacy; it’s about mercy. It acknowledges something algorithms can’t: the moral dimension of time. Humans understand that context changes — that who you were ten years ago isn’t who you are now. Code doesn’t. It treats every fragment as eternally relevant.
There’s a quiet cultural divide here. America treats “the internet never forgets” like a proverb. Europe treats it like a problem. One worships record; the other defends renewal.
Perfect memory is not intelligence. It’s paralysis. It leaves no room for redemption, imagination, or surprise. In the human brain, forgetting is what keeps thought alive. In society, it’s what keeps forgiveness possible.
The right to be forgotten is civilization’s attempt to give the digital world a conscience — to reintroduce entropy into code. Maybe the future depends not on what we remember, but on what we choose to let go.
A humane internet would remember like a person does — imperfectly, and with mercy.