The Friend Manual: How to make friends when you're bad at it

As we learned in the previous post, my Memory is an ass. So, I had to come up with a way to interact with my memory in order to make it more neutral instead of always listing towards the negative.

My approach was to take what I know about taxonomy and metadata to experiment with level setting myself. Prepare yourself for some nerdery.

**If you already know how taxonomy and metadata work, you can skip this post and head to the next.

Taxonomy seems like a good place to start

Let’s talk about taxonomy for a minute. Taxonomy is a nested structure used to define things into hierarchies. We’re taught basic taxonomies from grade school on up like this one:

• Animal
  • Dog
    • Pomeranian

First you have the category of ‘animal’ and then the nested sub-category of ‘dog’ and then ‘Pomeranian’ as a further identifier. Taxonomies work to allow you to narrow down subjects with increasing specificity. They also help to organize thought structures and properly categorize things.

And here’s where we get to metadata

In computer systems, metadata is information attached to other data/files/etc. that describes what the content is. Some simple examples of metadata are:

• File size – 2MB
• File name – pomeranian.jpg
• File location – Pictures > November 2022 > Walk

Metadata can also include taxonomy tags attached to them to help you search and identify content inside the files – basically, the metadata and taxonomy team up for better categorization that meets a specific need.

New taxonomy categories

I can also manually add taxonomy categories to a system to design the system to focus on what is important to me. For example, if I am analyzing memories of events in respect to friendship, I may add a taxonomy category that looks like this:

• Events
  • Events with friends
    • Fun – do it again
    • Not fun – don’t do it again
    • Not sure – try again next time
    • Sort of fun – try again with a different group of people

What does this have to do with memory?

Using the metaphors of taxonomy and metadata, I can create approaches to influence how memories are stored and recalled later (such as the event post-mortem). And they are especially useful if you, like me, have a love/hate relationship with your memory.

The more I think of how my memories are fallible, the more I can see where my memory has not served me well in the past. And I am starting to realize that my misinterpretation of events, or retroactive rewriting of events has consistently undermined my social approach.