Last year, we were ‘telling stories’; this year, we are ‘making memories’.

Every other advert for a luxury travel destination or a once-in-a-lifetime journey is encouraging us to make memories.

Whenever I see the expression, I find myself reminded––ho, ho––of Philip K. Dick’s story Total Recall.  Memories?  Take it from Arnie.  They’re not always good ones, are they?

The entire idea of making memories is a tautology.  We make memories whether we want to or not.  We have no control over the process.  We have no filter.  No on/off button.  We don’t choose which memories we make.  In the same way, we don’t choose which memories we lose.

Worse, though, I find that the Marketing Department concept of making memories propels us into some weird abstract future for which we barely have appropriate tenses.  This is practically beyond the scope of future perfect; it is more like future past imperative?

It is looking into a future, but one where we will be considering the past.  Memories deal exclusively with the past.  But by inviting me to make memories, I am being asked to project myself into the future to look back upon a past, which itself has not yet happened.  Somewhere along this hypothetical timeline, the present seems to have been lost.  Or perhaps the present is no longer important? 

In a social media glossed world, it doesn’t matter if the present is shit, as long as the future-past appears Instagrammably rosy.

© Simon Turner-Tree

Simon Turner-Tree doesn’t know if he is living in the present or the future-past.