You Must Remember This (Me)
December and January are the season of listicles. Magazines and blogs are filled with them: The Top Ten Rap Albums of The Year! The best shows to watch next year! etc. Starting in October (although it really starts in January, if I’m being honest), I begin to make my own public lists. My favorite albums. My favorite design articles. My favorite TV shows. The books I’ve read. So many lists that a friend joked that he wanted to see my top ten list of my top ten lists.
Why do I do this? It’s not an inconsiderable amount of work and takes up a lot of my limited brain power (“Is this album #3 or really #2? Let’s debate the merits of each in detail. Again.”) futzing over lists that — let’s face it — are fairly meaningless. Almost no one is going to care I ranked the new Shins album higher than the new Spoon album. I barely care, except that the top albums then move to my possible best of the decade playlist, which I will then use to make another top ten list. So when I say I barely care, I’m lying. I obviously care a lot, or else I would stop doing it.
The public reason I give for doing this obsessive behavior — which isn’t untrue — is that I’m doing it for myself, so that I can remember what it is I’ve read/watched/listened to over the last 12 months. My memory is terrible. I have a good mind for minutia, but a terrible mind for remembering basic day-to-day goings on. I can tell you the colleges that colleagues from 10 years ago went to, but not the names of my daughter’s friends. A classic “absent-minded professor” type, except I’m not a professor.
I learned years ago (and the great book The Reflective Practitioner confirmed it) that by thinking back on what you learned or did and trying to digest it helps you remember and grow. In some sense, list making is that. You discover what has stuck in your mind and what hasn’t. You learn discernment, what you value.
The not-so-hidden-as-I-think reason I make these lists is for praise and attention. Look at how sophisticated Dan is. How smart to have read all those books! Such an erudite fellow, with such good taste!
When I was little, every Christmas I would perform the 12 Days of Christmas in front of my extended family for their love and affection. Look at me! Aren’t I cute and funny and clever? This is really no different.
Making lists is also inherently competitive. Here’s my book count, what’s yours? I listened to this cool unknown band I found, what did you listen to, the new Taylor Swift album? Gee, no one has ever heard of that. You don’t agree with my ranking? Well, maybe your taste isn’t as good as mine. I don’t have an athletic bone in my body, but I can be intellectually as competitive as any trash-talking weekend warrior.
Needless to say, these are not the best parts of myself.
Umberto Eco said that we like lists because we don’t want to die. I believe this, but probably not in the way that he was thinking.
I have this fantasy that some fifty years hence when I am dead, my great-grandkids might want to have a conversation with me. For the AI to recreate me realistically, it’s going to need all kinds of data, and one of those pieces of information will be the books I’ve read and the movies I watched and the music I loved. So I write them down, in the hope that all of me, even with my many flaws, somehow lives on.
Originally published at The Pastry Box Project
