Pay attention now, or there's nothing to remember later

You cannot remember what you never truly noticed. Wiking emphasizes that attention is the gateway to memory — the brain can only encode what it processes, and in a world of constant distraction, we often experience life through a screen instead of through our own eyes.

Ironically, the very tools we use to "capture" moments — phones and cameras — can steal our attention from them. Research on the "photo-taking impairment effect" shows that people who snap photos of everything sometimes remember the objects and scenes worse, because they offload the noticing to the device and stop paying attention themselves.

Wiking's advice is to be intentional: put the phone away at key moments, savor deliberately, and give experiences your full presence. Attention is a decision, and it determines what raw material your memory will ever have to work with.