Memory by Numbers

by Zac Bentz

I’ve never considered myself the type of person to think numerically. I’m decent at math, but my brain is typically so driven by feeling and creative instinct that number-crunching doesn’t tend to find its way into my day-to-day life that often. That being said, I’m hopelessly addicted to stats. The allure of being able to view areas of my life with infographical ease is so strong that I pay $20 a year for an extra page on my Letterboxd profile that shows me everything from my highest-rated decade of film history to my most-watched actors of 2018 on on one seamless stretch of branded digital real-estate.

I think my obsession with letting sites like Letterboxd and Last.fm passively archive my life is rooted in a lot of things. Like I said, my brain tends to think pretty amorphously – while I plan things out to some extent, moving from one thing to another based on gut tends to more effectively accommodate my brain’s tendency to pivot pretty sharply of its own volition. The option to sit down and look at what I’ve actually been doing – or, in this case, the emotional stimuli I’ve consumed that have informed what I’ve been doing – is, for me, an opportunity to balance my free-flowing, hard-pivoting brain with the reality that the things I do are, in fact, fixed in time. Having documentation of those fixed points allows me to ground myself in whatever moment I happen to be existing in, despite the fact that I’m looking at an archive. It reminds me that I can be stationary. And it encourages me to make sure I’m being truly present when I’m listening to an album, or watching a movie, because I want to be able to look back on it and remember not just that I watched it at that time on that day, but what I was feeling, what my life looked like, why I felt drawn to that particular piece of media.

And not to psychoanalyze myself too heavily, but I think I have a lot of grief around parts of my childhood that I’ve either forgotten or intentionally chosen to bury, for one reason or another. So the knowledge that I can passively build an archive of what my life looks like right now gives me a profound sense of comfort. Maybe I should be journaling more, I don’t know. But as I wrap up my senior year of college, stats are what keep me warm, and remind me that I’m alive – and that I’ll continue to be.