Permanence

No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.

I dislike having a blog, a collection of curated thoughts, left for posterity. My thoughts are far from ordered and coherent most of the time, and never permanent.

One of the reasons the digital world feels so unnatural is that software is built to retain data indefinitely, mostly because we, the human programmers, loathe the idea of abandoning something we believe we might need later.

For us, any thought seems complete and conclusive, and part of human condition is forgetting time and time again that permanence in Nature is an illusion. In our natural state, we think, change our minds, forget, return to the idea, abandon it, all in one smooth motion. I am no more the person that wrote those words, and those words do not represent me any more. Why should I carry them around with me, baggage from another person?

I wonder whether we can make the human side of the Internet inherently forgetful, so as to respect the chaotic and evolving nature of reality.

By the time these words will have been edited and stored into the ether, I will be long gone.