I haven’t had the app as long as Kuriyama has, but I can assure you that I have not used it like he was describing. I’ve cried sitting at the drums, trying to get the roll off the toms to sync up with the beat, frustrated at my clumsiness. I didn’t think to turn my camera on at that moment. Yes, my phone is waterproof now, since I bought the updated model after I toppled into a pool at a party with an older version in my pants pocket. But I didn’t want to test whether this new model could sustain the deluge streaming down my face when I put sticks in my hands. I’ve used the practice pad as a coaster for my morning coffee plenty of times, blatantly ignoring the reminder I set out for myself to work out the beat. I didn’t want to capture a memory of how easy it was to blow off my commitment.
I asked Kuriyama why he wanted to remember all the dirty bits of his life. I sure didn’t. And he said, “Life is so short. Reliving all parts of my life helps me to appreciate every moment I have.” He told me about one of his single seconds in life. He captured the clip in the first year of his project. And it was a one-second video of a wall. Nothing on it. Nothing moving. No people. No sound. Just a wall. That meant absolutely nothing to me, but everything to him. That wall was what he saw in the first second after he walked out of a hospital room having learned that his sister-in-law’s intestines had strangulated. The blood supply became cut off and the pain was overwhelming. In the emergency room, she came close to death. Several times. “We don’t want to remember the bad stuff, but when we do it helps us appreciate what is so good about our life too. And reminds me that time is short. When I watch the video of my life I’m making, and see the years pass by, I remember that every day is important. Every day is an opportunity to do something that matters.”
I asked him why not shoot two seconds of every day, then. Kuriyama replied, “Watching a year of my life would take twelve minutes. That’s like half an episode of Seinfeld, and that’s way too long.”
There are plenty of other social media platforms that try to do what 1 Second Everyday has done. Despite their differences, they all provide a platform for people to present curated versions of their lives. We stitch together footage depicting some aspects of what each day was like, what we did, who we were with, and how we felt. Other footage falls on the cutting-room floor. It’s usually not a random choice of what stays rather than goes, but a carefully crafted selection, which more often than not highlights the happy, fun, interesting, and impressive aspects of our experience.
For example, computer scientists from the University of Southern California and Indiana University analyzed the content of almost twenty million tweets produced by more than eight million individual Twitter users. The researchers tagged the emotional content conveyed in each post. They found that while most of Twitter’s content is neutral, there is 60 percent more positive content than negative content. They also found that positive tweets were favorited five times more, and were retweeted four times more, than negative or neutral tweets. People post, like, and spread positive stuff more than negative stuff.
By design, 1 Second Everyday encourages a more representative collection of memories. It tries to cultivate a habit that counteracts the positivity bias in our selection process. By compelling users to memorialize some part of every single day—even their worst days—it becomes harder to select only the most positive aspects of their lives to commit to memory.
To find out whether this strategy for finding motivation would work for more people than just Kuriyama—whether a juxtaposition of good and bad can help us better meet our goals and find happiness—I reached out to Nick Powdthavee, a scientist at Warwick Business School who studies the economics of happiness. He focuses his investigation on how technology motivates individuals to do what makes them happy.
“Nick, you’re an expert on happiness,” I started off. “Aren’t people happier and more energized when they relive the best moments of their most exciting days, rather than the mixed bag of memories that a video of everyday life creates? Isn’t that exactly why puppy videos exist, and why we take pictures of our babies when they’re smiling and not when they are screaming?”
“Yeah, absolutely. Go check out the video of Putney that my wife made.* When people reflect on just the best parts of an experience, in that very moment people are happier, but in the long run they may not be,” Powdthavee responded. “When we flip through pictures where everyone is laughing and smiling, we do feel good. Right then. It feels good to remember having gone to that party and talked to that girl who then took a selfie with our phone. It might make us happy to watch a video of our new puppy when he’s sleeping. But when we’re trying to decide what we should do in the future, all those incomplete memories might lead us to make the wrong decisions. Knowledge is power in this context too.”
Powdthavee went on to explain that if we are actively engaged in trying to make ourselves forget about the restaurant that gave us food poisoning, the job we didn’t get, or the person’s feelings we hurt when we said the wrong thing, we might make the same mistakes again. Remembering the bad alongside the good can help us make better choices in the future. And that will make us happier in the long run.
I was inspired. And in an effort to make a change moving forward, I snapped a one-second video of the disgusting chicken wrap I’d bought off the flight attendant earlier that day—insides and outsides the same color of oxidized mayo flecked with green that was either tarragon or mold—to remind me not to rely on airlines to feed me anymore.
The Neuroscience of How Remembering the Past Improves Planning for the Future
Neuroscientists wrote books about him. They talked about him at their conferences. They traveled far to meet him. But his true identity remained a mystery to most everyone until his death a few years ago. They referred to him as simply K.C. in order to protect his identity back then. K.C. was not a fugitive, not an informant, not a celebrity trying to blend in at the grocery store, nor any other character trying to keep his name and likeness out of the papers. Instead, due to a serious accident that left him with a traumatic injury, K.C. had a remarkable brain that helped researchers uncover some of the most groundbreaking facts about how memory works and why we have it. K.C.’s brain was one of the first to suggest the connection between thinking about the past and planning for the future.
When he was only thirty years old, K.C. ran his motorcycle off the road and suffered serious brain damage of a very unusual kind. Though I never met him, everyone says that both before and after his accident, K.C. was a charming and sociable man. Well-spoken and knowledgeable. He knew that 007 and James Bond are one and the same person. He could describe the tallest tower in Toronto vividly with his eyes closed. And he could explain the difference between stalactites and stalagmites, facts that I have seen be useful in conversation with New Yorkers far more often than seems reasonable. Despite the seriousness of his accident, his mind seemed sharp, his recollection of black-and-white facts accurate, and his ability to contribute to Team Trivia Night spot-on.