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How Do You Record Your Life?

HappyDude20

HappyDude20

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Jul 13, 2008
3,688
1,479
Los Angeles, Ca
For all of 2009 i've tried numerous methods in recording my life.

As in writing in a paper based journal, using MacJournal, recording a quick capture YouTube video, or opening up Garageband once every few days to simply record my thoughts.

It's safe to assume my hard drive information will last me for decades; as I prefer storing all my photos (5000+) on a digital medium as opposed to an album in a closet at home where you never know when the worst may occur. (Of course I have a backup drive too which saves my most important files, i.e. documents, photos and home movies.)

The truth is I'd like to be able to look back at these younger days (I'm 21) and relive the times.

For a while I would open up iMovie and record a video once or twice a week, and upload it to YouTube. For a while I wrote in MacJournal on a daily basis.

Currently i'm walking around with a cell phone in my left pocket and an iPod Touch on my right. Friends have suggested I ditch the iPod Touch and get that Flip HD Camera....

Personally, I'm a big pictures and home movies kinda guy. Essentially what i'm saying is I don't really care for writing in a journal (anymore), I used to do it all the time and admittedly it's nice to read up on old entries from years prior but photos and recorded short snippets speak volumes to me. And having a 500 GB HD on my Mac I have ample space to store them all.

However, this post isn't about me...I'm super curious as to you guys and your methods of recording your life.
 
Photographs and generally doing everything with my girlfriend. We've been together for 7 years and already talk about how great them college holidays were and such.
 
Twitter and Facebook form a nice sort-of-life-log... we leave marks on them from day today and record some pretty random things!

Other than that, my iPhone and iPhoto are all I need I think. The geo-tagging creates a great record of where we have been.
 
I figure anything worth remembering I'll remember. And since I haven't done anything noteworthy for the annuls of time I don't see a need to keep my life documented for others.
 
I mainly use ocular and aural facilitates and record it to an organic neural network within my cranium.

It's a fairly hit-and-miss affair.
 
I associate music with experiences, usually journeys (listening to albums on trains to make the time go by etc). So I make mix cds for my current favourite music and I can listen back to them and they'll remind me of the events I associate them to :]
 
Domanic said:
I associate music with experiences
Click to expand...

Oh music can bring back the whole feel of a moment for me. It's insane.

Strongest influence is probably a greatest hits album I have by Guns 'n' Roses. Listen to it and I'm thrown straight back to Florida. Listen to Frightened Rabbit and I get last Summer. We Were Promised Jetpacks - walking in the dark in Graz, Austria. And on and on and on and on.
It's weird, but nice.

I just bought a proper paper journal for the first time in years. I wrote them for about 5 years during my teenage years and reading them now I desperately want to destroy them 'cause they're just awful. (obviously I can't bring myself to do it though. Curses)

I've tried blogging a bunch of times in the last 2 years but it never sticks, it's got to be a paper diary for me. I do love Twitter though. Can't even explain why, I just think it's great, and reading that back is surprisingly interesting.

People tend to get annoyed when I video them, saying this though my friend's home for Christmas and just stumbled across her old camera which I last saw in Summer 2007. It sounds like it has a treasure trove of stuff on it and I can't wait to see it.
 
I don't do it on purpose.
The mountains of posts I've made on various forums since 2006 have documented my life without me knowing it. As have twitter and facebook updates and posts.
 
One of the benefits of having an okish camera on your mobile. I've just got pictures of fun times. :cool:
 
I don't see the need to remember details of the past. The past is a lesser stage of development than the present. Plus, you've already lived it once. What is gained by rumination? Better to move forward. Of course, if you have kids they would find it interesting. But other than that, I see no value in it beyond sentimental memories, which can get you into trouble if the past wasn't that good.
 
MotleyPete said:
I mainly use ocular and aural facilitates and record it to an organic neural network within my cranium.

It's a fairly hit-and-miss affair.
Click to expand...

Same here, but it's probably more reliable than magnetic media. I definitely wouldn't assume that a hard drive would still be functioning decades from now.

--Eric
 
Photos, videos, keeping all my old documents saved on an external hard drive. Also, adding charms to my Pandora bracelet which are significant is kind of a way I record things.
 
HappyDude20 said:
The truth is I'd like to be able to look back at these younger days (I'm 21) and relive the times.
Click to expand...

Let me tell ya — I'm in the exact same spot right now. I'm right around your age; and to tell you the truth, I've gotten to the point where I've forgotten things from even just a few years ago! It depresses me that I already have so few memories of "the best years of my life". So I've started taking pictures occasionally, often of random things or moments that I'd like to remember. But, like you, I'm kinda a movie guy. I've started recording video on my iPhone constantly, even of things that might not matter. Because while it might not be a big thing now, I might want to look back on it in a couple years, remembering the good times or friends I had.

Don't stop doing what you're doing. Record it all. Be the guy who saves your memories so you can pull everyone back together in the end. I know I'm trying to do it, you should do the same.

instaxgirl said:
People tend to get annoyed when I video them...
Click to expand...

I know! I wish it wasn't such a big deal... Being able to look back on those moments are priceless, especially when you can edit it and put it online to share with others. We're living in a completely different age now where saving our memories is one of the most important things we can do in our lives.

Whenever I'm out with friends or doing whatever, I try to hide my iPhone and sort of act like I'm playing on it, when in reality, I'm recording. I want to get my friends when they're candid, and I think by using my phone it's a great way to do it.
 
Every couple of months, I'll have a breakdown and type a literally 10-15 page reflection on the events of the previous months. I have always thought that my life would be kind of interesting (in a sadistic kind of way) to people, so maybe I'll try to publish it someday.
 
I used to write poetry extensively, and looking back on my older stuff I can kind of "get inside my own head" as it were and remember how I used to feel and what things used to be like. Mostly, I depend on my memory which is very good). Lately, I've been recording the family and the pets with the camera. I'll be glad to have them when I'm 65 or so and everyone's gone.
 
I started keeping a journal about 16 years ago. At that time, I was using a Hypercard stack (oy...). I kept it up for about two years. About the time I met the lady who later became my wife, I let it slide by the wayside.

Various computer changes and a crashed Zip disk later, I had thought I had lost those old entries. I began again about three years later, after we were married and my son was born.

Lo and behold, going through my old Zip disks, preparatory to copying them to CD-Rs, I found a copy of the stack with my old journal entries! Mind you, I didn't have Hypercard anymore (I had been using Entourage's Journal function, then switched over to MacJournal) so I had the laborious task of using Word to open the entries and sifting through the garbage to get the gold, so to speak. I was amazed at the amount of stuff I had completely forgotten about.

My advice: Document as much as you feasibly can. Human beings are amnesia machines, and as much cringe-inducing stuff that we might rather forget there be, you need that to put the good times in perspective.
 
A few random forums, my blog, and the past year's worth of emails which gmail has so much storage I won't have to ever delete any.
 
I've tried recording my life several times... I really want to do it, and I quite enjoy when I find things from as little as a year ago, but I just can't bring myself to keep working on it.
 
It's actually nearly impossible to remember our past. Many studies have revealed that we remember very little and that which we think we do remember is actually usually wrong, sometimes entirely wrong, and not the way the event actually happened.

We often incorporate our dreams into our memories and get the two confused. You could have had a dream just a few weeks ago that involved your childhood and then you will start recalling that as having been a long remembered childhood event.

One popular study involved the 9/11 attacks. A few days after the event, researchers asked several hundred test subjects what they were doing when the attacks occurred. When asked the same question two years later, the test subjects had completely changed their stories, yet would swear that they were remembering it right.

While photos help us recall general details of events, we still are usually not correctly remembering what happened. Videos are really the only way to "capture" a memory, but you aren't really remembering anything, we are just reviewing it.

This strange aspect of the human brain actually occurs on a larger scale, too, and can involve entire families misremembering events.
 
^ In general, this "softening" of the memory is a great blessing.
 
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