In 150 years historians will be lamenting that we recorded everything we did and now they have to sift through terrabytes of memes, pointless arguments, and outright misdirection to get at anything resembling truth.
Your brain deliberately forgets trivial stuff. Do you really need to remember every lunch you had? Same goes for all the mundane stuff in history.
On the other hand so little of the mundane stuff was recorded that when we do see it it can be a window into how people actually lived, like Samuel Pepys diary. The daily stuff was so accepted as boring and common knowledge that it wasn’t considered worth recording.
And stuff like that is absolutely facinating to me, in small doses anyway. I keep a journal and I think I’ll write a few pages about what my routine is. At home on the weekend and at work.
“In a way [my undertaking] is an entirely original science. In fact, I have not come across a discussion along these lines anywhere. I do not know if this is because people have been unaware of it…[but] perhaps [people] have written exhaustively on this topic, and their work did not reach us… The knowledge that has not come down to us is, after all, larger than the knowledge that has. Where are the sciences of the Persians…the Chaldaeans, the Syrians, the Babylonians…the Copts and their predecessors? The sciences of only one people, the Greeks, have come down to us…as for the sciences of others, nothing remains.”
Ibn Khaldun, 1332-1406 (as translated by Rosenthal)
I used to say the same thing to my highschool history teacher. Little did I know, it would help me later on. I’m not talking about pointless dates - it’s the lessons that matter.
One can’t know everything, but knowing some of it enables us to prevent the mistakes that we would have made otherwise.
yes but how much of that history is important? no doubt its still the majority, but i suspect that some of that 90% you mention is just some random irrelevant persons life. i should also mention that i am not a historian nor a statistics person so take what i say with a grain of salt.
I would say considering homo sapiens have been around for ~250,000 years we need a lot of decimal places… if you want to consider prior homo species that’s 2.8 million years and honestly you might as well call it 100%.
And you are ultimately going to die as part of that 90% that won’t be remembered for anything at all no matter how big of a deal you view yourself in any form function or manner.
Me too. It won’t be so bad. Unless they check the hard drive. Oh buddy then we’re historically remembered. Like, that’s a lotta porn.
The thought of having your digital foot print live on forever was kind of neat, but most of it wasn’t worth remembering or will probably get deleted after a few decades anyways. Future generations will ever know about the witty banter on yahoo answers.
There’s lots of sources from the losing side. Josephus was a Jewish writer who told of the Roman destruction of the temple. The history of the Eastern Front of WWII, as it was known to the West, was dominated by the writings of German soldiers for a long time.
History is written by writers. For much of it, that means it comes to us from an educated upper class. That’s where the historical blind spots are.
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