When people look back on 2017-2018 we will be able to clearly see what we did wrong, and our technology only enables that more.

Typically when you look back on your past you can pinpoint all of your mistakes, all the bad things you have done and regret. Roy F. Baumeister, a social psychologist, did some research on why we keep bad memories so fresh in our minds. In his paper ‘Bad is Stronger than Good’ he states that the remembrance and leniency towards bad outcomes make sense when you’re trying to survive. Isn’t that what we’re all doing, trying to survive from the embarrassment we sometimes have to swallow down, the thoughtless decisions that linger in the back of our minds? However even when looking back at our pasts at least most things are clouded time. We can move on from many regrets in our life. In this day and age, however, that is not a luxury we have.

We now have this recorded footage and pictures of our pasts, put up on the internet for people to peruse. While even today we can look at the old videos of ourselves when we were young, even then cameras were rarer and film expensive, while today anyone who has a phone can record their own history. In the future, looking back, we won’t have to wonder what it was like to live a daily life in 2017-2018 because everyone will have their own personalized old videos of what happened. The Snapchat stories and Youtube vlogs, they’ll all paint a picture for the children of the future of what people were like. Most importantly they will show us a picture of ourselves doing things that, to put it simply, make us cringe to remember.

Right now we can look forty or so years into the past and see where we went wrong. How we could have and should have corrected our mistakes. The same will be true for us forty some odd years in the future, looking back on today. We will see the records we kept, the videos we have and accounts of our times today, and we’ll see when we should have spoken up. When we should have backed down. If anything, we will see it with even more clarity as we view the events through detailed accounts of them, sometimes even watching ourselves make those very mistakes.

In the future, in 50 years, not only will we be able to look back on these days and see our past mistakes, we will be able to see them in the vivid detail that only comes with have video evidence of all the unfortunate mistakes we made.