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What is Life Logging?

By Anthony DePalma on July 11, 2013

What is Life Logging?

How can I define it? It's the merging of man and machine, the fusion of flesh and files. It's the digital representation of outward appearances and inner monologues - thoughts and dreams, routines and recipes, budgets and birthdays. It's the chronicle of you, immortalized on servers and stored among endless oceans of 0s and 1s. Life logging is the art of tracking your life.

We are programmed to log our lives. We learn from past experiences and from the experiences of others. Wisdom comes with age for this reason. Without our experiences, we are naive.

But there's a lot of things to experience. We are bombarded with stimuli every day. Our senses are assaulted with headlines, advertisements, songs and smells and everything in between. We do our best to weed out the useful from the useless, but things inevitably get lost in the fray. In the battle for your attention, ambitions and ideas are sacrificed as collateral damage. Is it any wonder that in the dawn of the Information Age, we forget things by dusk?

What did you experience last week?

What was your favorite meal? What did you dream about? Was there a goal you wanted to achieve? An event you wanted to remember? A book you wanted to read?

It's getting harder to answer these questions. We are slowly learning to filter out our lives. There is simply too much information to take in, and too little space in our brains to store it. Unfortunately, we have trouble distinguishing what's worth remembering and what's worth forgetting. Ask yourself the same questions from a year ago, and you'll see how much more difficult they are to answer.

But our experiences are worth keeping. Ideas this week can inspire you next week. Dreams can offer you subconscious insight. Health precautions today can spare you misery tomorrow, or ten years from now. Goals you want to accomplish can be accomplished, or they can be filtered out and forgotten and lost forever.

These experiences, no matter how banal, define your life. Unlike everything else, you'll never be able to ask Google who you met, or what you dreamed about, or what inspired you. This is your life; these are your experiences. It's up to you to track them.

Try it!

Track something in your life today. Immortalize an interesting Dream, document your favorite Recipe, add something to your Bucket List, or chronicle your life through a Journal.

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