The other day, my husband and I were discussing a vacation we took within the last few years.

"Was that 2021?" he asked. "Or 2020?"

I racked my brain but, despite it having been a lovely trip, I had no idea. Something similar happened when a good friend living far away asked when we'd last met up.

Two years ago? Three? Four? It was all a blur.

As a so-called geriatric Millennial (who comes up with these names?), my first impulse was to blame my aging brain. But while I'm as guilty as anyone of occasionally losing my keys or forgetting where I parked, on reflection I had to admit that my memory overall has improved recently.

It's only when it comes to certain biographical details that I have a hard time remembering. The culprit isn't the passing of the years, I concluded, it's that the entirety of the pandemic is becoming one indistinct blob that I'm having increasing trouble recalling.

Am I alone in this? Am I crazy? Richard Sima, a neuroscientist turned science journalist who writes for The Washington Post, and who interviewed several academic experts on memory to explore the idea, says no.

Sima offers readers a detailed description of the neuroscience of memory. It's fascinating, but here's the quick and dirty takeaway in case you remember nothing else (ironic), pulled from Sima's consultation with people like cognitive psychology professor Norman Brown:

• Our memories aren't like a computer, diligently filing everything of interest that we may one day be interested in recalling.
• Instead, the default reaction is to forget most new memories, and instead to recall only emotionally salient events that are consequential in our lives.

"What we remember tends to be distinctive, emotionally loaded, and deemed worthy of processing and reflecting upon in our heads after the event happened," Sima writes. "Our memories are centered on our life stories and what affected us personally the most."

Now, you might think this might have made the pandemic—with its dramatic shutdowns, sky-high anxiety, terrifying headlines, and constant discord and debate—the perfect example of an event worth remembering.

That's true, except that much like how if you say you have 100 priorities, you actually have zero, the issue here isn't that the pandemic wasn't memorable. It's that too much of it was.

"Even for such salient emotional events and life-threatening events, the more you have of it, the more you will have trouble capturing all of them," explains Suparna Rajaram, a psychology professor who researches memory and with whom Sima also consulted.

In other words, the pandemic presented us with a fire hose of developments. (See how many of these you remember): delta, omicron, omicron B.1.1.529, super spreaders, bivariate boosters. But for many of us, all those epidemiological details emerged against a backdrop of profound personal monotony.

The news was terrifying, but for many of us, especially if you lived somewhere with mandatory quarantines, our day-to-day was dull as dry toast.

"When events are uniform, they are harder to recall," Sima notes. Plus, very few of us are making a special effort to recall the worst days of the pandemic and thus strengthen those memories. As a result of this overload of news and uneventful day-to-day life, pandemic memories are quickly fading into one great, undifferentiated blob for many people.

All of which makes me feel a bit better about my inability to remember recent life details.

But, from a collective perspective, the idea of institutional forgetting (the idea that society will forget the lessons about how to handle a pandemic and find itself on the back foot if another virus crops up again) is a bit more scary.

Pandemic disruption and the soul searching it generated kicked off a vast reassessment of where, when, and how we work, for example. From the Great Resignation and the Great Relocation to quiet quitting and the return-to-office wars, a blizzard of recent workplace trends can trace their roots to our collective experience with Covid.

Allowing those experiences to fade in our minds is natural and inevitable to some extent, but I hope we won't forget the hard-won knowledge that came with our Covid struggles.

In other words, I'm glad to know my forgetful brain is performing as designed. But, it would be a real loss if our collective reassessment of hustle culture, work-life balance, and employee flexibility faded along with our Covid memories.

7 things worth knowing today

• Cities across northern Taiwan ordered cars off roads and people to stay indoors on Monday for an annual air-raid exercise as the island steps up preparations in the event of a Chinese attack amid rising military threats from Beijing. (Reuters)
• Amazon employees who refuse to relocate near their teams' "hub" offices will either have to find a new job internally or leave the company through a "voluntary resignation." The move is part of Amazon's effort to encourage more in-person work. (Business Insider)
• USC freshman Bronny James, the eldest son of Lakers superstar LeBron James, was hospitalized Monday after going into cardiac arrest and collapsing during a basketball practice with the Trojans, a family spokesperson said Tuesday. Bronny, 18, was placed into ICU but is now in stable condition. (CBS Sports)
• Long gone are the days of spontaneous holidays overseas. Beginning in 2024, the European Union will require visitors to get pre-approval via the European Travel Information and Authorisation System — and that goes for summer jet-setters from the U.S. Before securing tickets, lodging, or a reservation at that trendy hotspot you saw on TikTok, vacationers will need to submit an ETIAS application for approximately $8. (NY Post)
• Realty show drama: A new Spanish language Netflix reality show called "Falso Amor," which translates to "Deep Fake Love," splits five real-life couples up into two different houses, adds a bunch of hot singles to the mix, and then subjects individuals to the experience of watching their partner cheat on them -- in videos that may or may not be deepfaked. (Futurism)
• Just kind of funny, might well be tongue in cheek, but thematically follows that last item: A Florida Chipotle's Yelp page is going viral, after user after user posted 1-star reviews alleging that a female employee there keeps seducing their husbands. (Complex)
• We just passed the 40th anniversary of the Gimli Glider: a Montreal-to-Edmonton Air Canada flight in 1983 that, because of a variety of compounded errors, ran out of fuel and had to make an emergency landing on a deactivated former military runway in Manitoba. I'm sort of a geek for these kinds of stories (especially where the pilot and co-pilot managed to put the plane down without loss of life). What nicer way to celebrate it than to realize that the captain and a passenger, who reunited at a commemoration event a decade ago, are now a couple. (CBC News)

Thanks for reading. Photo by Unsplash. Jess wrote about some of this once upon a time on Inc.com. See you bright and early tomorrow.