Leonard Shelby's system is shit in Memento
Seriously, if you don't remember things that happen, don't you think one of the most important things to write down would be things that happen?
I watched Memento for the first time last night. I've been wanting to see it since Tenet tickled my brain when I first watched it a year ago. This post has minor spoilers for Memento, but it's probably fine to read if you haven't seen the film.
Memento is about a guy with anterograde amnesia - that is, existing memories work normally but he cannot form any new memories beyond a certain point in the past.
The necessary question is, "How do you function at all if you can't remember anything?" Naively, this seems borderline impossible. The film is actually very effective at showing us all the subtle places we instinctively rely on memory: recognizing friends, lovers, or enemies, knowing how to get home, remembering what happened earlier in a conversation or just what you were doing a minute ago.
In the film, Leonard builds a system of notes that he has built instinct to rely on. In one pocket, photos of friends with short notes about them that can be quickly read. In another, information about where he lives and what car he drives.
Notably absent from the system is any record of what has happened. You know a journal, the thing people without amnesia use to keep track of things that happen to them. Any notes he leaves for himself are either "do this thing" or "this is a fact". He finds himself, often to his dismay, in weird and sketchy situations, with no knowledge of why he is there, but only a note of instructions without reasoning. And the notes he leaves himself are brief, vague, and always expressed in absolute terms.
[Spoilers in this paragraph.] Of course, there's many reasons that he may do this, somewhat intentionally. First of all, it makes for a much more interesting film. But, even within universe, we slowly realize that there are some things he may not want to remember, or even moments of self-deception that crop up near the climax of the film. The point of this note isn't really to examine that side of things. (I'm adding another sentence of padding so the spoilers don't stick out while skimming.)
There's also the issue that it's probably quite hard to build a system when you can't remember anything. Creating any such marginally complicated system includes revising it as issues crop up, but Leonard may not be able to remember issues or necessarily even identify long-term issues in the first place. The system needs to truly be a second brain. Or honestly, in this case, a first brain.
Anyway, I'm not so interested in the in-universe explanations for these questions in Memento. A much more interesting question is to just design an ideal system, from the outside. Something that would work for me, if I was suddenly struck with a condition like Leonard's.
This question isn't entirely hypothetical. I believe any good "life system" or "second brain" (your way of tracking the things you learn and the things you have done or need to do) should be pretty strongly resistant to memory loss. If I randomly lost significant pieces of my memory, I think an ideal system should allow me to get back to work relatively smoothly.
So what, might this look like? What pieces is Lenny missing?
Historical record. If I do something significant, write it down in a pocketbook or something. To at least have some record of what's happened. May require digestion later to be particularly useful "in the field".
Dates. If it's a person, when did we first meet? If it's something I should do, when did I decide it should be done, and when did I do it? Every time I write something down, I should also write a date. (Note: Leonard has no clue what the current date is, which also needs some solution.)
Trust/confidence information. For each person, keep a record of things to trust or not to trust about them. (Memory is quite good at this, so it's a big disability not to have this.) For ongoing conversations, some physical record of whether you should trust this conversation, like a token kept in a pants pocket. For information, some indication of how confident you are that it's true.
The film is from 2000, so we have a huge advantage in the modern day via smartphones with fingerprint readers. We have an easy way to store an essentially unlimited amount of photos and journal entries. It's interesting to think about how to set up Obsidian or something like that so that you instinctively know where to find the information you need. The key is naively surfacing the right information quickly: what are you doing right now, what information do you need to do it, and why? A single scrap note works well, as does a polaroid with notes on the back. Maybe it's good the film wasn't written in the 2020s?
Here's some of the things I think about in my own second brain "life system" which is especially optimized for software development:
Keep a complete record of all the things I'm working on. I call these threads. Whether it's "implement fancy new feature X" which will take a few weeks, or just "get a haircut", this keeps things from getting accidentally dropped. This is borrowed from Getting Things Done (as are a lot of the ideas I use).
For each thread, keep a record of what has been done and what is the next thing to be done. This simplifies decision-making and lets me get quickly back up to speed even if I don't work on something for a long time and don't remember it well. (Also from GTD.) My notes have revision history, so I can check the date I added a piece of info to the thread.
For everything that I've done, keep a record of why I did it. Which alternatives were rejected, and why? I revisit decisions frequently and it's very helpful to avoid rehashing things already considered.
Every day, use these systems to proactively decide what my daily goals are, at the beginning of the day. Then, throughout the day, I don't need to do any complicated thinking about what I'm working on. I just do what I already decided on. I can leave the hard thinking to solving my actual problems.
Keep a record of every person I interact with. For people I know well, this is useful to keep a record of things I need to chase them for, or to keep a list of gift ideas. For people I don't know well, I keep track of important life details so I can get to know them more quickly. I am bad at this, and would like to do better.
For any routines, write down a checklist. Then you just need to remember to look at the checklist. My memory sucks at building long/complicated routines.
For any secret (password, PIN code, certificate, etc) store it in my password manager. So, any time I am prompted for a secret I should have, I know where to find it.
For any other random piece of information, store it in my notes. This is the least polished part of the system, because it's quite hard to reliably file information and know where to find it later. I need to get better at this.
I also need a better way of keeping track of articles, blogs, books, etc with interesting information that I might like to revisit later. I currently just use ad-hoc notes for this but it kind of sucks. I know some people use Readwise for this (I think?) so maybe I need to look into this more.
Well, that was a lot longer than I thought it would be. It was probably a lot more useful for me than it was for you. Thanks for reading, anyway!
If you post a reply on another blog or social media, or just want to chat, email me! christopher@cg505.com