You Won't Remember the Pandemic the Way You Think You Will

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/05/how-will-we-remember-covid-19-pandemic/618397/

My plague year began on the evening of Wednesday, March 11, 2020, when I was compelled to cancel the Atlanta-to-Denver plane tickets my husband and I had purchased for the next day, for a long visit with our oldest son, daughter-in-law, and small grandson. I was all packed.

For the first half of the week, I’d tried to configure the increasingly ominous COVID-19 news in ways that wouldn’t keep me separated from that curly-haired 3-year-old boy. Several of our adult kids had attempted to pierce my denial, calling and texting to say, “Mom, it doesn’t feel safe.” Wednesday night, when I saw the Denver family ringing me via FaceTime, my heart dropped. Upstairs, weeping, I unpacked the picture books and little wooden toys.

My husband, meanwhile, said that everyone was overreacting, even our son who works at the CDC. But that same night the NBA suspended its season. Oh, my husband thought, this must be serious! At that moment, his plague year began.

In the weeks that followed, as friends and neighbors recounted similar stories of when normal life stopped for them, I began to wonder about the tales we would someday tell of the pandemic. For the rest of my life, would my story begin with the cancellation of two Delta tickets for Flight 1355, ATL-DEN, scheduled for March 12, 2020? Would my husband eternally narrate the fact that, on March 11, 2020, the National Basketball Association suspended the 2019–20 season after Rudy Gobert, Utah Jazz center, tested positive for the coronavirus? And—bigger picture—what would we as a nation remember?

*snip*

[hunter]

1. One of my children panicked on his vacation March 2020 and flew back home early.

It turned out he was correct in his assessment of the situation.

You pay for a child's higher education and that's what you get.

The day before was our extended family's last normal visit to a restaurant.

[GusBob]

2. Academics and their studies make me smile

Here’s what happened in real life in our clinic
Our clinical director had retired and the position was vacant
Our acting director, a pharmacist with little education in health care administration was in charge

Not to run long but what she did was brilliant. Department supervisors were required to keep a running log of actions and decisions. ‘Let me know what is working and what is not”

Basically a team approach. Short term results and long range planning for this pandemic and maybe the next.

We beat COVID on this reservation months ago. Our in action reports and after action reports will never ever let anyone forget the way it was.

It is unforgettable

[multigraincracker]

3. Some day COVID Diaries

will be as valuable as Civil War Diaries are to historians.

[femmedem]

7. I work in the historic preservation field and organized a pandemic documentation project.

I do believe it will help historians, and at the same time, it gave isolated people a chance to share their experiences.

[multigraincracker]

8. I have a friend that is a small town reporter.

She wrote an article suggesting everyone keep a diary of these times.

[misanthrope]

10. Our local history museum made public requests for journals

Considering how notoriously conservative and complacent the local populace is, I don't think too many undertook it.

I have been keeping one since last February when the inevitable became clear.

[femmedem]

11. It's a great idea for people who have the time.

It seems some of us were working harder than ever, juggling home schooling and jobs, and others were unemployed and isolated.

We got a few journal submissions, some videos, artwork, and lots of written experiences, most accompanied by photos. The journals were the best because they tracked how people felt over time: one, for example, was by a young woman who at first enjoyed the reduced hours and expanded unemployment, then grew increasingly stressed as work became riskier, then very alarmed as her finances grew tighter and they had a covid outbreak at work, which was inevitable. (She is a bartender.)

[KentuckyWoman]

4. My recollection will be

Also March 11 - canceling a trip and filing the trip insurance claim.

I will tell people I spent almost a year listening to our current president make asinine statements about treatments and the general state of things. We had fist fights in the local grocery over wearing a mask because people are just crazy.

If I live long enough, I wonder if I'll be telling people it was the beginning of the end for 100 story office towers, because so many people figured out they could actually work better from home.

After that those jobs moved away to a cheaper place in the world because if you don't have to physically be there, it can be done from anywhere. But I'll like be dead by then.... so....

[kcr]

5. I think this stuff is way overblown

Maybe because the media isn't good at reporting science? I don't know. Our memories may not be like video recorders, but that doesn't mean they're always entirely unreliable cotton candy fluff, either. I was able to locate an old apartment building we lived in when I was around 4 years old on Google Earth while only knowing the general area it was located in, a place I hadn't visited since, using my memory of landmarks. This wasn't based on pictures I'd seen or stories I'd been told. These were mundane things like the grocery store, gas stations we drove by, every day normal trips we took. I verified that it was indeed the building we lived in by taking a screenshot of the street view and confirming it with my mother. That wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't been able to accurately recall anything in my past.

[chia]

9. It's really not overblown, the very act of recalling a memory changes it. When we recall with other

people, our memories can be synchronized or entangle with others' memories and over time we may claim those memories as ours too, without even realizing the transition. The same thing happened with people who recorded their memories of 9/11 right after that day and then years later were asked to recall their memories and compare them to what they'd written years earlier. Many of them were not only off, they were way off. Memory is tricky, and a lot more unreliable than many of us realize.

Once my son recalled a memory from a family event and I had to gently remind him he wasn't there, he hadn't even been born yet. He'd absorbed the stories of that event being told over the years and genuinely thought he was recalling his own memories.

This is why contemporaneous notes (such as during the Mueller hearings) are so important.

[kcr]

12. I'm not saying memory is 100% accurate

I'm just saying the complete opposite is also not true. If memory really worked like that, we would have no sense of personal continuity. Just because it doesn't work exactly like a video recorder doesn't mean it's without any sort of reliable accuracy. I suspect it's the media cherry picking the more outrageous claims over the mundane science that won't get the clicks. Like this, which doesn't show up on the first page of a search:

https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/the-surprising-accuracy-of-memory

And this:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/defining-memories/201405/why-your-memory-is-far-better-you-think

Mistakes of memory are more newsworthy to us than everyday accuracy, just as crimes are more newsworthy than everyday legal behavior. We do not shout out our memory accuracies. (Ironically, remembering instances of faulty recall is a form of accurate memory.)

[chia]

13. And I'm not saying it's entirely inaccurate either, so perhaps we're talking past each other.

I tried to access the paper referenced in your first link, but it's behind a paywall. I tried to find another source that would provide more information than your first link which gave a percentage for the days-after result, but no percentage for what the subjects remembered when asked months later. ("With longer delays, participants recalled fewer details, but the details they did report were accurate.&quot

A couple other sources were out there, one of which had this to say:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-memories-events-retain-remarkable-fidelity.html

The results showed that participants' accuracy was high in both cases, though, as expected, the number of details they remembered decreased with age and time. At best, they recalled about 25% of their experience. "This suggests that we forget the majority of details from everyday events, but the details we do recall correspond to the reality of the past," Diamond said.

It's normal to retain more of your experience in your memory a couple days after vs. months or years after, and nderstandably, a flashbulb memory event will have more impact than everyday memories. But without being able to access the paper itself, I'm left with the various ways it's been summed up, one of which tells me that while the study's subjects remembered what they remembered with accuracy, that over time what they remembered was about 25%.

I think that's a significant distinction, but that's just me. Not trying to be pedantic about this but there's a wide range of possibility in our ability to remember our own life events. We can remember less or more of a stressful event depending on how we handle stress as a unique individual. When it comes to a threat to our survival, for example, people are often likely to focus on the weapon rather than on the environmental details around the weapon. When your life depends on the gun pointed at you, your focus can narrow down, instinctively. We may bury memories that are too painful, we may embellish memories that make us look better, conveniently forget memories that convict us. We can be self-protective in our memories. We can magnify memories out of anxiety. There are just so many variables.

[Tink41]

6. The start of the great recession

I remember clearly how I knew things were going South and something wasn't quite right. It was Sept of 2008 and in the middle of the week entire families with under school age children were shopping together Home Depot, grocery store etc..
I had already lost my job end of August, which for my profession isn't unusual. But the amount of families encountered were.
The Pandemic the same way pertaining to work. We were waiting for the call to come in for the install of the largest trade show in North America and it didn't happen. The next day at 5:30 pm we were informed by email they pulled the plug.
I am aware that the memory will be different for everyone, depending on what that defining moment was for them.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

14. I certainly don't have a photographic memory...

... but my memory seems to be better than most. It's the emotionally impactful events that are easier to recall, of course.

Two of my siblings have annoyingly bad memories. My evangelical sister is one of them, but she also LIES to herself and others if something isn't super-positive.

I mentioned a disgusting behavior of our (long-deceased) grandmother to that sister a few years ago, caused by her failing mind. So I felt bad that our grandmother's mind had become that debilitated, but that didn't change the repulsive nature of it. (Which I won't mention here.)

My sister was temporarily living with our grandmother at that time, but she kept insisting that she couldn't remember it. That particular example of bad memory from her was too much for me, and I started shouting that maybe something was seriously wrong with her long-term memory if she couldn't even remember that! Finally, after my repeated badgering, she admitted that she recalled it. She then screamed at me, "I don't like to keep unpleasant thoughts in my mind, okay?! So drop it! I don't want to hear it mentioned ever again! Ever!!!!"

Then I replied, "Fine! I'm relieved that you indeed remembered it, at least!"

And obviously those quotes aren't verbatim at all, but the semantics of our "conversation" are accurate.

I honestly suspect that my sister actively erases and modifies her memories to fit her "model" of the world. She certainly doesn't have an honest observational view of the world, like a scientific approach.