The older I get and the more into retirement I delve, the more I find myself wondering about the value of memories. We are generally raised to believe that keeping memories is a good thing. It’s a pretty deep cultural assumption. Photos, journals, archives, “never forget,” nostalgia as a positive emotion. The whole apparatus of human development treats memory as inherently valuable, and forgetting as loss or failure (dementia, “senior moments,” a fading photograph). But it’s worth noting that such thinking is not universal or even fully rational. Psychologically, some forgetting is adaptive. Trauma researchers, for instance, note that the inability to let painful memories fade (as in PTSD) is itself a disorder. Nietzsche argued that too much history/memory can paralyze action; he called for a capacity for active forgetting. Philosophically, Buddhist and Stoic traditions are more ambivalent with clinging to memory (like clinging to anything) being a source of suffering rather than value. Practically, some cultures and eras were far more oral and impermanent by necessity. Memory-keeping at scale is partly a technology artifact (writing, photography, cloud storage) that shaped the belief as much as reflected it. So the “more memory = more good” intuition is real but probably more contingent than we usually realize. It’s a mix of evolutionary usefulness (learning from the past), cultural values around identity and continuity, and the technologies that made preservation cheap.
Memory loss (or “shedding”) is a normal part of how memory works, not a malfunction. There is actually a natural forgetting curve. Most new information fades within hours to days unless it’s reinforced through repetition, emotional significance, or connection to existing knowledge. This is adaptive and it keeps the brain from being cluttered with irrelevant detail. It’s called synaptic pruning when the brain actively weakens or eliminates unused neural connections, especially during sleep. This isn’t just passive decay, it’s an active process that helps consolidate important memories while discarding noise. Every time you recall a memory, it becomes temporarily malleable and gets “rewritten” with details dropping out, blurring, or shifting in this process. Some decline in memory speed and retrieval is a typical part of aging, distinct from pathological conditions like dementia. New, similar memories can overwrite or blend with older ones (retroactive interference), while old memories can make new ones harder to form (proactive interference). All my recent thoughts on adequacy of sleep plays into this. Sleep plays an outsized role here as it’s when the brain does much of its sorting, keeping what seems useful and letting the rest go.
As you age you start increasing the amount of memory shedding that you embrace…though it’s more nuanced than a straight decline. Most notably, processing speed slows. Encoding new memories and retrieving old ones both take longer with age, which can look like “shedding” even when the memory is still there. It’s a retrieval problem as much as a storage one. Our working memory also actually shrinks as we age. The capacity to hold and manipulate information in the moment (like remembering a phone number while dialing) tends to decline more than long-term memory does. The process of synaptic pruning becomes less efficient with age as well. The brain’s usual “clean up unused connections, strengthen useful ones” process gets noisier with age, so both relevant and irrelevant memories can degrade. We become less able to distinguish the two, which is interesting and probably sometimes problematic. The hippocampus, the area in the brain most central to forming new memories, shrinks somewhat with normal aging, but that’s separate from and much milder than what happens in dementia. And there’s also the issue that older adults get less deep, slow-wave sleep, which is when memory consolidation happens most efficiently, meaning that new memories may not “stick” as well. Importantly, this all happens in an uneven manner. Procedural memory (skills, habits) and long-consolidated memories tend to hold up well, while forming new episodic memories (what did I do yesterday) and free recall (versus recognition) decline more noticeably. Most of this is normal aging, not a sign of something pathological. The line between normal age-related change and a concerning pattern usually comes down to whether it’s interfering with daily functioning.
The real question needs to be whether this memory shedding is productive or destructive. Forgetting is part of what makes present-moment attention possible. There’s the issue of cognitive load management. If every sensory detail and passing thought from the past stayed fully accessible, working memory would be overwhelmed trying to sort signal from noise. Shedding the irrelevant frees up bandwidth for what’s happening right now. I’ve been saying that for years, especially whenever Kim wonders why I don’t remember something she is certain that she already told me. Old memories, especially emotionally charged ones, can intrude on present experience (rumination, anxiety loops). Some natural fading of their intensity makes it easier to engage with the current moment rather than replaying the past. Research on habituation shows that if the brain didn’t let older, similar experiences fade into the background, everything would feel equally salient. Nothing would stand out as new or worth attending to. Forgetting the routine is what lets novel or important stimuli capture attention. There’s evidence that fading emotional intensity of memories (even while factual content stays roughly intact) helps people stop being hijacked by past events and stay responsive to present circumstances. But there is a flip side as well. Like all things in life, this is really about a balance, not “more forgetting is better.” People with highly superior autobiographical memory (who forget almost nothing) don’t report being unable to live in the present; and people with memory disorders that impair encoding of new experience often struggle more with presence, not less, because they can’t build the continuity that makes “now” feel anchored. So it’s less that shedding directly causes presence, and more that a healthy, selective forgetting process clears space for it. Meanwhile, the ability to form and hold onto new memories is equally essential for feeling grounded in the moment.
Do you remember Barbara Streisand singing in The Way We Were, “Memories, may be beautiful and yet, what’s too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget.”? It brought a tear to our eyes as we watched her brush aside a lock of Robert Redford’s blonde hair. That was the dramatic way of showing memory shedding, not the daily housecleaning we all go through with our aging and slightly less supple brains. I like to think of shedding memories as less of a necessity for emotional self-preservation and more a choice of proactive cleansing and refreshing. When my 100-year-old mother died, I spent an intensive two months writing her memoirs. It was cathartic to relive her life and reboot all the good memories, but mostly it served to clear my emotional decks so that I could move on productively. The older we get and the more friends we lose along the way, the more important it becomes to work at staying emotionally productive, and shedding memories is an important part of that process.