The Sentinel-Intelligence

The Sentinel-Intelligence

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The Sentinel-Intelligence
The Sentinel-Intelligence
Everyone Just Wants to Forget: The Power of Collective Amnesia
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Everyone Just Wants to Forget: The Power of Collective Amnesia

Most people are more than willing to forget the past, along with its important lessons.

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Jessica
Aug 09, 2023
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The Sentinel-Intelligence
The Sentinel-Intelligence
Everyone Just Wants to Forget: The Power of Collective Amnesia
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Eleon

We all have things we want to forget.

Maybe it's a bad date. Maybe it's an abusive childhood. Maybe it's a year spent locked up in your house, thinking about death.

Maybe it's all three.

Some of us do a balancing act between forgetting and remembering. In order to get through the day, I have to forget my teen years, and a lot of my 20s too. We're talking about things that left me choking back tears in front of police officers, or lying to social workers when I got called out of class to answer squirmy questions. But I also have to remember. All those painful memories contain valuable lessons. They contain the baseline code of who I am.

I force myself to relive them.

Pain is a great teacher.

Those memories often explain why you feel sad or angry for no apparent reason, or why you do things that don't make sense on the surface.

A lot of people don't see the world like that. They just want to forget. They think it'll make them happy. They want to pretend the past never happened, especially…

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