It can take days to retrieve a lost thought or months or of course it can just be permanently lost and memory is a hell of a thing. I had an analogy to death about winning an all expenses paid vacation to wherever you liked with one catch: you'd have no recollection at all of the vacation as soon as it was over. Would you go? If you say no, are you really an atheist? (Of course then people just lie and so on and I don't bother ever actually asking anyone the question.) To know that you are going to forget everything you ever do or think makes bothering to do anything utterly futile and thus one must not really be an atheist.

But actually we're all constantly forgetting so much. We don't have to wait to die for that. A person could really sit down and think this through and be horrified. Right now, what you're doing: it's partially futile as you're almost certain to utterly forget this moment and this day. (Still, surviving it isn't futile.)

It's a sort of death then happening to you daily? Yes? Yes? No.

You could get video cameras and put them everywhere and record every second of your existence. Or we could develop perfect memory. And then what? All those memories are no good unless you're remembering them. But the longer you live, the more and more memories till you just sit around remembering, all the time; no longer actually living; just reliving.

So what could you do to make absolutely sure you remember this moment forever? You could do something incredible stupid and destructive. Or write an extremely detailed blog post. Or face that day after day the details just aren't important. It's the overall flavor I guess that's at least hopefully worth remembering.

...and when we remember we actually don't retrieve, we recreate the memory. I have a habit of wondering, "What if actually I did it slightly different in some very bad way?" Then, I recreate the memory in that negative way and wonder which was the way it actually happened. It's a way to put yourself constantly on trial; to persecute yourself, like K.

While you're at it, you can imagine future encounters but with negative what ifs. What if someone with power over you decides to destroy your life? Or just do this or that negative thing to you? What will you do?

Did you act corretly here? And here? What will you do if such and such happens. Etc.

You can wear yourself out. But to some extent you have to do the above. Because you have to be prepared and most of us really are on the chopping block at any given moment.

I'm almost completely unstressed at the moment. Tuesday I'll do badly on the test I didn't study for and then get a bit stressed, more or less till May/June, when hopefully I'll get a job in my new career, etc. During that time the stress will probably do bad things to me. In finding ways to counterbalance I'll probably act in ways that seem stupid here and there. I suppose because on top of it I refuse to think this the best of all possible worlds. Instead I then do the opposite and search and search for the essence of what's wrong with this one.