Why Can't We Talk About the Past: A Brief Essay on Cultural Amnesia and Karmic Cycles
When I was in college, I briefly worked at a magazine as an editor. One thing that frustrated me about the writing process was how much emphasis there was on staying "relevant," which pretty much meant you could only write about what was trending or what happened in the super recent past. If it happened two weeks ago, it was basically dead news.
And sure, you could argue that it's how you keep people informed. Why worry about the past when you can't change it? All we can do is focus on the future and make sure we're there when the next big thing happens. But then again, how do you learn from the past if you keep ignoring it?
In her book "On Photography," Susan Sontag talks about how self destructive the American experience can often be. A capitalist society like ours, she explains, requires a culture based on images. It needs an insane amount of entertainment, pictures that grab our attention and stimulate our need to buy, as well as images that distract or numb us from the harsh realities of class, race and gender.
Think about the endless amount of ads we're exposed to every day. Ads that are often better scripted and more entertaining than the average TV drama. Think about how everyone on Tik Tok and YouTube is trying to sell you something. How everything is a short-lived trend. Our need to stay relevant, to keep creating new content and posting new pictures, isn't really about us trying to live in the moment. It's more about trying to hold on to new ways to make a profit. It's like they say: another day, another dollar.
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past but the person who invents it," Sontag writes. "For the past is not a code: it cannot be read as one reads a text. The past is more like a collection of images, fragmented and unstable. The very recent past is experienced as irretrievably remote: everything is being torn down, swept away, replaced, because the possibility of a stable present is impossible."
\What Sontag describes in this passage is the concept of cultural amnesia, a society's forgetfulness of its own history, values, and collective memory. This isn't just about forgetting facts or events. It's more about losing the deeper lived connection to the past and its meanings.
For one thing, in a world flooded with images, we consume the past visually instead of engaging with it critically. We remember iconic photos tied to major events, but seeing an image doesn't always mean you understand what happened or what it was like to be there. Especially when we're so used to seeing photos that should be shocking or terrifying, it's easy to get desensitized to the things we once believed were important.
Modern American culture often values the new over the lasting. So much that at this point, almost nothing we create or buy is made to last. Capitalism thrives on planned obsolescence, which is a policy of producing consumer goods that quickly become obsolete and need to be replaced. This is done by:
Frequently changing designs (think every time a new iPhone model gets released)
Termination of the supply of spare parts (so you can't fix what you've bought after it breaks)
The use of nondurable materials (things are literally built to break).
But this isn't just about products. It shows up in how we interact with trends, always searching for the next viral moment. News moves faster, too, rendering historical context nothing more than a boring sequence of facts and figures. We engage with the past through commodified nostalgia. For example, when we talk about the '90s or Y2K, we focus almost exclusively on the fashion and aesthetic, rarely acknowledging the tense social climate, the recession, 9/11, or the many global crises that kept people on edge. Especially when we can find some kind of resale value in it. Something "old" becomes "vintage" or "retro."
We've created a world where we value instant gratification so much that we're willing to trade away history and culture for a cheap thrill. There is no such thing as timeless art anymore. In fact, we don't even call the stories we engage with art. That would mean that they were made with some kind of unique vision in mind, some attention to detail. What once aimed to stir the soul is now engineered to occupy attention art reduced to content, its worth measured only by how well it markets itself.
In Eastern philosophy, there's the idea of karmic cycles. Karma is the idea of cause and effect. Based on the decisions we make or the actions we take, we get certain results, or karma. When we get stuck in certain patterns or we keep attracting the same kind of situation, it usually means we're stuck in a karmic cycle.
Maybe you keep dating the same kind of person or making the same kinds of friends and they always end up being wrong for you. Maybe you've had a history of financial problems or you keep making the same mistakes and you can't figure out why. If any of this resonates, you too, might be stuck in a karmic cycle. Lucky for you, awareness is the first step to recovery. But the harder question is, how do you get out?
On my way to get coffee one day, I saw a sign that read: "Don't dig too deep or you'll let the Devil out."
On the surface, it was a catchy, Southern ad for an excavation service. But if you're anything like me, you love to look for a deeper meaning. And in that sign, I found more than a deeper meaning. I found a confession, an indirect clue into the well-hidden history of the region I live in, the Deep South. Some people interpret the devil as something evil, something that stands in opposition to anything good.
After I started to study tarot and mythology, I learned that the devil can also represent our fears, our unhealthy attachments, and our shadow, or the part of us that we're scared of because somewhere along the line, someone made us feel like we needed to suppress it. When we live in a culture that has taught us to dichotomize human nature instead of understanding it, we learn to bury everything we're ashamed about instead of processing it and learning from it
Maybe America's cultural amnesia isn't just about corporate greed. Maybe we're scared to face the past, and corporate greed is just a really good distraction from it.
The secret to escaping a karmic cycle is first being conscious of what you're doing. as psychologist Carl Jung once said, "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
When we're constantly chasing after the next thrill or aiming for the next achievement, we might forget to stop and think about whether all this chasing is bringing us closer to the lives we want to live. Sometimes it's not even about being happy, but about keeping up with some sense of normal. Sometimes keeping things "normal" feels like a safer option than change, but normal isn't always good. It's like going through life with a thorn in your foot. Maybe you're used to it, but are you happy with it there? Can you live like that forever?
If you've decided you want things to change, the next step to freeing yourself is learning the lesson. And to learn the lesson, you have to confront the past. What put that thorn there? Why were you so scared to take it out? Who would you be without it? That thorn could be anything, from a past trauma to a fear of vulnerability. Maybe even a broader scale cultural issue like a failure to reckon with the atrocities of the past. But no matter how much you try to distract yourself with new, shiny objects, it doesn't go away until you decide it needs to go.
All this to say, maybe we should talk about the past a little more often.
