The Art of Conscious Forgetting

Finding Balance

In my post last week, I shared some thoughts on our relationship with ignorance, and how embracing it is key to finding our way as the world around us changes. Today, I’m looking at ignorance’s emissary, forgetting.

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There was an interesting post by

Persuasion

on Monday, 27 Notes on Growing Older, which I enjoyed, even as I found myself with a different view. Growing older is a privilege, compared to the alternative. How we come to terms with it, and more importantly, harness it, feels like a subject for another post. For now, however, I am grateful as it triggered some ideas for this post. Forgetting is something that may creep up on us as we age, but until it does, and we are conscious of its power, it is an important capacity.

Forgetting is a price we pay for technology. Even as it makes our lives easier in the short term, it extracts a price by allowing, and often requiring, that we forget how to do what we have designed it to do for us. It makes me wonder: what if each automation doesn’t just remove a task, but amputates a conversation? What small, important conversations are we not having when we outsource those tiny slivers of our agency to processes and technology?

At the heart of the idea of New Artisans is the notion of craft. Our work is an expression of who we are becoming. Craft skills are an ecosystem. The potter knows the clay, and is shaped by it even as she shapes it; it is a conversation. The same applies to bakers and dough, and the generation of thoughts that the Chorley Wood process for mass production at speed will never know. I write using a fountain pen on paper before going near the keyboard - there is an intimacy between writer, pen and paper that technology cannot produce (for me, anyway). In the early days of coding, each coder’s product was different, and was difficult for others to pick up mid-process. Steve Jobs used to have an obsession with “tight code” - something similar, maybe, to Colin Chapman’s “first simplify and then add lightness” at Lotus Engineering. Both were craftsmen. Great teachers do not just impart knowledge; they cultivate enthusiasm and curiosity, something increasingly challenging in an education system designed to produce Meat-Based Algorithms for industry.

Craft operates in the kairos time of poetry, rather than the chronos time of productivity. If we could dissect something we find beautiful, we would see the pauses, rework, and the patience of just sitting with work until it is ready to move forward.

Every time we automate, we turn the dial of learned helplessness up a notch. We forget how to read maps, becoming lost without GPS; we forget how to remember, cushioned by external storage, and we forget how to be alone, helpless without stimulation.

The forgetting isn’t accidental - it’s cultivated. Each forgotten skill creates a new dependency, a new market and a new opportunity to profit from it.

We have an Archaeology of Agency. Layer by layer, we bury our agency: First layer: "I don't need to remember this anymore" Second layer: "I'm not good at this anymore"
Third layer: "I can't do this anymore" Fourth layer: "I never could do this" Fifth layer: "No one can do this" Sixth layer: "This was never a human capacity"

Question: How many layers down are we digging our own incapacity?

And a grammar of diminishment: “I can't function without my phone”, "I'm hopeless with directions, "I need my notifications”, "I'm lost without GPS", "I'm helpless with math". This isn't the language of choice - it's the language of addiction, of learned helplessness crystallised into identity.

We now have a well-developed industry built on manufacturing incompetence. Systems are designed to make us forget our competence, to make alternatives unthinkable. What if "user-friendly" often means "agency-hostile"? What if the easier something becomes to use, the harder it becomes to refuse?

Time is on the Industry’s side. First, we forget we ever had the capability, then we can't imagine functioning without the system until we can't conceive of alternatives. The algorithm doesn't just predict our choices - it shapes what we believe our choices could be.

Anybody using AI will recognise it has not just made our lives “easier”, it is sycophantic along with it. AI Psychosis is an emerging issue, a sort of Stockholm Syndrome for tech.

There is also an uncomfortable issue. The privilege of age and location. It is easy for me to see the downsides, but what about the upsides of technology?

I find writing therapeutic, but it can sometimes be a lonley activity. Likes and comments are always welcome, but every now and again, we get a full on thoughtful response, like this one from

Leadership, Rewritten

in response to an Outside the Walls Post. I really appreciate the reminder of Eiron, from Greek Theatre, and the source of our term irony,

So, I turned to Claude, asked it to adopt the persona of Eiron, and review my writing on this. The result was salutary, and summarised here:

Before we romanticise the artisan's path too completely, we should acknowledge its blind spots and privileges. This philosophy of conscious craft and selective automation may inadvertently create a new aristocracy—available primarily to those with the economic security to choose inefficiency and the leisure to contemplate embodied wisdom. While you celebrate the GPS-free navigator, you write these words on automated platforms, rely on spell-check, and benefit from countless conveniences that free me to think rather than merely survive. The single mother juggling three jobs may find automation liberating, not imprisoning. The surgeon using robotic assistance isn't less skilled—she's more capable. Perhaps some forgetting truly is freedom from drudgery, some dependencies create space for higher-order creativity, and some automation enables rather than diminishes human flourishing. The challenge isn't to resist all automation, but to remain conscious about which human capacities we choose to preserve, develop, or consciously delegate—and to ensure these choices aren't available only to the privileged few who can afford to make them.

Point taken.

The Art of Conscious Forgetting

There are things we forget because we’re busy; there are things we forget because we need to forget, and eventually, things we forget whether we want to or not. Used wisely, technology is a valuable friend; used unwisely, it is a usurper. It is down to us to draw the line.

We have more information available to us today, which generates more questions than we have the capacity to handle. Discretion has probably never been more critical, and selectivity in what we forget is part of it. It is more art, I think, than science.

Forgetting needs organising. Some of it, we can delegate to technology, some of it, the company we keep, in the knowledge that it will be returned to us when we need it.

Before we automate the next thing, or fire a question off to Claude or one of its friends, perhaps we need to focus a little less on what it will make easier, and a little more on what it will teach us. Forgetting is a trade - what we choose to give away, and what we may receive in doing so.

Questions on my mind…

• Does social media and a commitment to efficiency interfere with our openness to how villages and communities work?

• Does the infinite scroll make us forget what attention feels like?

• Communities change by forgetting old ways and making way for new - but do we get “forgetting bulimia” - consuming convenience so quickly we get no nutrition from it?

• If forgetting is the price of automation, who is paying and in what currency?

• In a world of infinite convenience, what inconveniences are we willing to preserve for the sake of our own adaptive capacity? What if the most resilient act in an automated world is the conscious choice to remember what we could forget?

Perhaps the key insight for me is this: institutions and systems need us to forget our capabilities to maintain their relevance. But personal resilience requires us to remember what we can do, even as we choose when to do it ourselves versus when to delegate.

I harbour a secret wish that technology, such as AI, used well, reduces our needs for the entities our organisations have become. I suppose that’s not a secret anymore…..

Don’t forget our Wednesday Conversation.

Every Wednesday, 5:00 pm UK on Zoom. If you’re not on the list, drop me a line and I will make it so :-)

Because whatever else we do, there is no substitute for quiet conversation, as this post from Sue Heatherington reminds me:

We do not know each other on our own

However much we think we understand, we can never fully know ourselves alone. 

Our picture may be deep, but it is not complete. 

Who helps us see?

And who can we bear witness to?

Because we only truly become known in company. 

Sue Heatherington.