Meet Me in the Notes App
Our phones, in other words, can augment our memories. Julia Soares, assistant professor of psychology at New Mexico State University, says that devices can become “partners for helping us remember things.”
“You’ll find some very heartfelt things that are digital,” she explains, adding that sometimes people don’t think of these “digital scraps or mementos” as being particularly valuable, but many people hold onto voicemails or even emails.
Recently, over coffee, one of my dearest friends took me on a tour of her meticulously organized notes. If my notes app functions as the junk drawer of my mind, hers was like opening the door to different beautiful rooms: a list of good things that are happening, checklists for household maintenance, and a folder of notes her sister assembled of their mom’s recipes, complete with videos: a living cookbook. In our conversation, my sister talked about her own notes app discoveries: goals she’d written down only to be met with surprise at how much she’d grown since then, or the minutiae of everyday life she documented for no obvious reason. Other people shared their own earliest notes: addresses of apartments they were touring, passages of favorite books they kept for inspiration, a compliment they’d received, nonsensical thoughts that somehow got funnier the longer they kept them.
