I remember being in the bathroom with my aunt when I was a little shy of turning 4.
She had been staying with us to help my mom with the kids, but had to leave the country as her temporary visa was expiring. I had grown quite attached to her, and the morning she left, she took pity on me and let me follow her around everywhere. Even into the bathroom. I also remember being at the airport and watching her plane take off. But my mom said it took weeks for me to accept that she was really gone and I kept looking for her around the apartment. I don’t remember that part.
Today, she lives a few hours away from me at nursing home. I plan to visit her around the new year.
I have a few memories that could be it, but they have no timestamps. I don’t know how early they are. Could be me sitting on potty in living room in the doorway, looking at TV where my dad was reading something on Telext of channel 1 (recognizable by the orange bar on top).
It’s the same for me. I have relatively early memories, I even know I was very little, but I don’t know which was when exactly, so I cannot pinpoint my earliest.
1992; I’m two years old, and having an absolute blast running through the sheets my mom had put up out on the clothesline.
About a decade ago my mom and I were talking about early memories. It turns out she happened to have a disposable camera on her at the time, and there’s pictures of me, joyfully forming my earliest memory as a toddler.
I can recall being in the cot under the window in my parents room, but there is nothing else attached to that memory.
I can also very clearly recall being put onto the floor in the back of my dad’s dark blue side opening van, which had an orange tinted skylight, and crawling across the corrugated floor panel to pull myself up against the wheel arch - since this was evidently before i could walk - whilst my parents were talking just outside, and the van itself was parked across the road from the entrance to our garden.
However, apparently my dad never owned a van of that type, nor anything like it, and nor did anyone that either of my parents or my - significantly older - siblings are aware of. So despite the clarity and detail of that memory, I have doubts that it is at all real.
Earliest I can date is reading a newspaper about a significant event when I was not quite 4. I remember having to ask my mother for help with some of the words. I think I have earlier memories than that - like my mother teaching me to read, but I can’t tie them to a specific time.
To me, it’s all about rational return on investment providing economic incentives to achieve what we want to achieve.
My favorite example to explain what I mean is my own personal health insurance. I have a chronic medical condition that requires constant medication, frequent visits to specialists, and expensive medical tests and procedures. There is simply zero chance that I will ever pay enough in a monthly premium to cover what I cost. Meaning I am always a net financial loss for a private, for-profit insurance company.
This gives a private company every incentive in the world to obstruct and deny my care in hopes that I’ll get frustrated and give up, or maybe even die and get off their books forever.
The government, on the other hand, has a positive financial incentive to keep me healthy. If I am healthy, I am working, paying taxes, buying goods and services that contribute to the economy, and hopefully contributing something beneficial to my community. Only the government (acting as a proxy for “society”) naturally profits from insuring my healthcare.
This is why I believe we should have fully socialized medical care. Because there are some specific things that only the government has natural positive economic incentives that align with what is beneficial for the general public.
Whatever those things are, they should be socialized. And generally those things are basic life sustaining things like food, housing, medicine, education, utilities.
I’m fine with privatized capitalism in a very restricted, heavily regulated niche form. But all the basic necessities should be socialized.
Earliest one I can actually put a date on is my first day of kindergarten. I remember the other kids doing some sort of crafting project outside. Other memories may or may not be earlier, hard to tell.
The clutch in my wife’s car started slipping on Christmas day. We had to limp it home and switch to my car which is an '89 Honda Prelude. My wife doesn’t like my car but at least it gets around for now. First world problem.
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