The Great Forgetting
Every generation thinks it is seeing the world for the first time. That feeling is powerful, but it hides a problem: we keep losing hard-won lessons to speed, noise, and convenience.
The Great Forgetting is not a single event. It is a steady drift—memories of how things broke, how we fixed them, and what the fix actually cost—slipping out of view just when they’re needed most.
Part of this is mechanical. Digital life rewards the new over the true. Feeds reset every morning. Search engines favor recent takes. Platforms bury corrections beneath fresh outrage. Long reports get replaced by short clips. Over time, the archive becomes a blur, and people think this week’s headline is unprecedented when an almost identical fight happened five, ten, or fifty years ago.
Part of it is institutional. Staff turns over, project docs vanish, and leaders move on. The old playbook sits in a forgotten drive while a new team proudly reinvents the wheel with square edges. Government, media, schools, and companies each have their own ways of shedding memory—retirements without handoffs, rebrands without histories, committees without minutes. The result is policy whiplash and repeated mistakes that feel avoidable in hindsight.
Part of it is emotional. Hard lessons are uncomfortable to hold. Wars end and the costs fade. Crises pass and the tradeoffs that saved lives get second-guessed or misremembered. People downplay the parts they disliked and amplify the parts that flatter their side. Over time, stories harden into team slogans, and the messy middle—where solutions usually live—goes missing.
The Great Forgetting shows up everywhere. We lose track of basic civics and blame process for outcomes we never participated in. We forget how debt compounding works and act shocked when interest eats a budget. We let supply chains sprawl and are surprised by fragility. We drop privacy habits, then wonder why our data follows us. We stop practicing the skills our grandparents treated as normal—repair, redundancy, restraint—and call it progress.
The stakes are practical, not poetic. When memory weakens, the loudest narrative wins. Bad actors love that. They can recycle errors with a new coat of paint and call it innovation. They can claim “no one warned us” when warnings exist, just not where the algorithm looked. They can pit neighbors against each other while the underlying issues repeat on schedule.
There is a way to push back. Memory is a habit, not a museum. Communities can keep living timelines: what happened, who decided, what it cost, and how it turned out a year later. Organizations can require post-mortems that survive leadership changes and are easy to find. Schools can pair new debates with old case studies so students see patterns, not just moments. Newsrooms can revisit major claims six months on and report the score, not just the kickoff.
Households can do this too. Keep a simple family log of big choices and results. Before adopting a hot trend, ask, “What happened last time we tried something like this?” Archive important documents in multiple formats. Rotate through basic preparedness tasks. Practice the boring safeguards that make freedom usable: strong records, clear boundaries, and promises you can audit.
This is not nostalgia. It is maintenance. Tradition without inspection becomes superstition. Innovation without memory becomes chaos. A healthy society needs both: the patience to remember and the courage to improve. The Great Forgetting is not inevitable. It is a choice made daily—one that can be reversed by the plain work of writing things down, checking them later, and refusing to treat attention as a substitute for truth.
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@1TheBrutalTruth1 Oct 2025 Copyright Disclaimer under Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976: Allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research.
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