Memory Lane

Ten years ago, I moved to Paris to start a new job. My brother lived there already and I was excited to join him.  

We had two weeks to do whatever we wanted. We biked our way through every cobbled street, stayed out late in the rowdy hours of the night and cured our hangovers with coffee and croissants.Today, I still think of these two weeks as a defining moment of our brotherhood.  

The Pareto principle is used in business to describe how a minority of efforts are responsible for driving a majority of results. It is equally useful to understand how we assign meaning to time. A relative few moments in our lives disproportionately influence our experience and relationships. These two weeks spent with my brother brought us closer together than many years sharing the same roof. 

There’s something a little disheartening about the realization that most of our time is mere B-roll we might never again recall. The weekday morning routines, the recurrent meetings in our calendars, the weekend trips to the playground. They will be thrown in the pit of oblivion by the picky gatekeepers of our memory.  

But the Pareto principle offers an optimistic reframe. It doesn’t matter so much that most of our life won’t make it to the Pantheon of memory. We can count on those few meaningful moments to satiate us. And instead of seeking more time, we should seek ways to infuse meaning into it no matter how little we’re holding in our hands.