In the twenty-first century, forgetting has become almost taboo. We are persuaded to save everything, remember everything, archive everything. We carry cameras in our pockets, log our steps and sleep cycles, store our messages in the cloud, and monitor our emotional states through apps that promise insight. Our self-identity, apparently, is an accumulation of data. A hard drive. A vault. The more we can remember through metadata and biometrics, photos and posts, messages and receipts, the more whole we ought to feel. Or so we are silently sold.
Beneath this surface of accountability and efficiency, a quiet panic has stirred: the sense that to forget is to lose control. Our digital culture is shaped by surveillance capitalism and compulsive self-documentation; it equates memory with mastery. The drive to preserve has become existential. Forgetting, by contrast, is often framed as failure. “If it’s not on Instagram, did it even happen?” The question, half joke and half warning, captures a deeper shift: memory is no longer trusted unless it’s visible, shareable, externally confirmed. And yet, forgetting is not a flaw. It is a space worth cultivating.
Historically, the value of memory was tied to scarcity. Oral cultures prized memorisation because the material world had no means of holding speech. Today, when nearly everything can be stored, memory begins to flatten. It is stripped of context, severed from emotion, repeated without reflection. We preserve so much that we stop discerning what matters. In this overflow, the human becomes searchable, and the condition of being human becomes less knowable.
There is a deeper hunger beneath our hoarding. A fear of death, surely. But also a fear of ambiguity. We want records because we mistrust the slipperiness of experience, both our own, and each other’s. We want receipts because we fear betrayal, and bureaucracy. But is perfect recall really the same as safety?
The Nature of Forgetting
We are not meant to remember everything. Our brain, unlike our iCloud drive, forgets by design.
Forgetting is essential to how we function. Our minds are living organisms, constantly reshaping experience, pruning what no longer serves us, metabolising emotion into meaning. Without forgetting, memory can become hoarding. Without forgetting, healing can stall.
Neurologically, this is not metaphor. The hippocampus does not store infinite reels. It filters. It decays. It curates. The synapses that don’t fire together fade together, almost in a form of mercy. This process, known as synaptic pruning, allows us to shed obsolete associations, mute unbearable pain, or let go of names that no longer hold meaning. The same systems that build memory also edits them.
Adaptive forgetting is what lets a child stop fearing a dog that once bit them. It’s how a widow can eventually fold her partner’s sweater without breaking into tears. It’s what allows lovers to forgive, countries to reconcile, and individuals to grow beyond their past. Forgetting, in this sense, is the nervous system’s way of not letting the past overstay its welcome.
Even autobiographical memory—our sacred terrain of self-identity—is deeply unstable. What we call a memory is often a reconstruction: shaped by mood, framed by language, modified in every retelling. The more we revisit an event, the more we reshape it. Each recall is a remix.
Archives and Antagonists
Some things are forgotten on purpose.
Archives, by their nature are intended to establish a sense of permanence, but they also carry other uses. They are shaped by power: by who is allowed to record, who is deemed worth recording, and what gets classified as memory in the first place. Consider the vast colonial archives of the British and Spanish Empires, meticulously catalogued treaties, censuses, and correspondences, while oral histories of resistance, displacement, and kinship were largely ignored or actively suppressed. For every officer’s journal preserved in acid-free sleeves, a hundred Indigenous names were never written down. For every legal document stamped and shelved, another was redacted, misplaced, or destroyed, sometimes to protect, often to erase.
This is the imposed forgetting of the state, the institution, the canon. A silence curated by gatekeepers. What looks like absence is often exclusion.
Silence isn’t always erasure though. Sometimes it’s a form of refusal. In many Indigenous and diasporic traditions, memory is kept alive through gesture, songs, and not by “putting it on a shelf”. To withhold from the archive can be a way of keeping knowledge sacred, relational, alive. There is a difference between forgetting and choosing not to be seen.
Archival silence cuts both ways. It can do harm when it erases people or stories that should be remembered. But it can also offer protection. Some memories survive better in private, passed quietly from person to person, outside of the spotlight. Not everything needs to be recorded to be real. And some truths are too fragile, or too sacred to otherwise be stored.
Forgetting as Future
To forget with intention is not the same as carelessness. It’s a conscious and intentional choice to let some things soften, blur, compost. Our world has become obsessed with backups and receipts, it takes courage to release. And our future happiness and health may depend on our ability to do just that. To let digital excess fade, to release outdated senses of ourselves, to free our technologies from the demand for total recall.
We can already see some beginnings of these user experiences implemented: apps with disappearing messages, photo albums set to auto-delete, laws that grant a right to be forgotten. These are early signs of a cultural shift from hoarding to pruning, from proving to trusting. Still, most of our systems are designed to accumulate more data, more memory, more presence. But what if we designed our experiences for graceful disappearance? What if forgetting became a form of care?
There is an ethics in forgetting. An invitation to live without always capturing a facsimile. To forgive without proof. To move forward without needing to pin every version of ourselves to the wall. What we forget can shape us as much as what we remember.
To forget well is to grow. To leave some rooms unlit. To let the past be part of the soil.
