“The story is different in every person, and it’s constantly changing, constructed by millions of interactions over a human life. No one has ultimate power over the story, not even the person it is inside of. There are many forces that seek to actively shape the story, but so far, all of those forces have had roughly the same level of ability becau

if everyone remembered everything, would our differences get shaved away? What would happen to our sense of self? It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn’t be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film.

You can’t step into the same stream twice because it’s always flowing. Everything is.