Can We Keep Time?

It can be tough to face our own mortality. Keeping diaries, posting to social media, and taking photos are all tools that can help to minimize the discomfort that comes with realizing we have limited time on Earth. But how exactly does documenting our lives impact how we live and remember them?

In this episode, diarist and author Sarah Manguso reflects on the benefits and limitations of keeping track of time, and Charan Ranganath, a professor of psychology and researcher at the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience, discusses what research reveals about how memories work and how we can better keep time.

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Becca Rashid: You know, Ian, whenever someone asks me to get in their BeReal, I’m always like, What? What is that? What’s happening? What are we doing? Why are we doing this? Do we need to do this?

I am not very social media–savvy. So they have to give me a break.

Ian Bogost: Becca, you’re talking about the app, right? This app that asks people to post a photo from both the front and rear cameras on their phone, and like you get a coordinated message in your friend group to take your BeReal photos?

Rashid: Yes, and I’ve heard that everyone on the app takes a photo at the same moment in time?

Bogost: At the same time. Yeah, that’s how I understand it.

Rashid: I’m curious if that’s, like, across time zones. I don’t know; very interesting.

Bogost: Yeah, I think it is. I think it’s like synchronized photos of everything, and then they vanish again.

Rashid: Normally, we’re like sitting on my couch or eating lunch. Like something super mundane.

Bogost: Mmm hmm. Yeah. I mean, I think that’s part of the idea—to show that most of the time your life is ordinary.

Rashid: Right.

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Rashid: Welcome to How to Keep Time. I’m Becca Rashid, co-host and producer of the show.

Bogost: And I’m Ian Bogost, co-host and contributing writer at The Atlantic.

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Bogost: Becca, do you remember time capsules?

Rashid: Yes. I didn’t really live in that era, but yes, I’ve heard of them.

Bogost: That’s what I was wondering. It used to be kind of a thing. You would, uh, collect a bunch of photos and scraps of paper and letters and whatever you could find and bury it in the yard for folks a hundred years later to dig up and investigate.

Rashid: Right.

Bogost: We used to assemble these archives, these time capsules for the distant future. And some of them are cosmic—you know, in 1977, America sent human memories, almost time capsule–like memories, into deep space on Voyager. And now they’re out there in the galaxy somewhere.

Rashid: Mmm. Right.

Bogost: But as a kid in the ’80s, it felt like time capsules were everywhere.

Like you’d trip over people burying capsules in their schoolyards or churchyards.

Rashid: Really?

Bogost: Yeah. I remember I went to visit the site of the Oppenheimer atomic bomb test as a kid. And they were putting a time capsule in the ground. And, like, you know, the stuff that goes into it—it’s a different time horizon than your camera roll.

Rashid: You yourself don’t have access to the records of your own life; you’re trying to save for someone else.

Bogost: Yeah; it’s not for you. It’s for some future generation to see the ordinariness of your present life. That’s quite a bit different than taking smartphone photos that you’ll probably never look at again, or posting ones on BeReal that will then disappear a day later. So it does kind of seem like apps these days, they really orient us toward the present, and less so toward the past and the future.

Interesting you say that. I feel like—I wonder if it really orients