At Capacity

Everyone I know seems to be talking about their memory lately, how it isn’t what it used to be.Mine isn’t, and there’s some comfort in commiseration.

Yes, we’re getting older, isn’t it something to observe, how we can no longer so easily recall names or events or what it was we were just about to say.My memory used to be so good I’d have to hide it so it didn’t weird people out.I’d pretend not to remember someone’s full name and their kids’ names and how they used to own a coffee shop outside Albany, lest they think I’d freakishly compiled a dossier on them after our brief conversation at a party three years ago.

Now, I’m rewatching a TV series I remember liking in 2022 because I can’t remember even the broadest outline of the plot.I constantly jot notes on stuff that used to surface in the normal churn of my brain’s functioning: funny remarks people make, bits of gossip, summaries of conversations.

I take minutes on my own life.Sure, age probably has a lot to do with it.For a while, I blamed quarantine and stress for dulling my edge (one friend suggested I might be in my “butter knife era”).

But lately the metaphor that seems most apt is that of a computer: It feels as if my hard drive is full.I’m reading and watching and listening to so much content — in addition to living life and having actual experiences, never mind daydreams and nightmares and extended reveries — that it seems I’m running out of disk space.

I can’t count on things to auto-save anymore.Since I can’t selectively delete stuff the way I would with an actual hard drive, I’m left creating backups in notebooks, mistrusting my own outmoded technology.I’m particularly interested in how a full hard drive is affecting my consumption of culture.

Cultural omnivores keep lists of the books they’ve read and the movies they’ve watched, adding to their knowledge and fluency with each item checked off.As I went through The Times’s recent list of the 1...