TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Quentin Hardy asks a good question: what’s lost when everything is increasingly recorded?

Remember the get-to-know-me chat of a first date or that final (good or bad) conversation with someone you knew for years? Chances are, as time has passed, your memory of those moments has changed. Did you nervously twitch and inarticulately explain your love when you asked your spouse to marry you? Or, as you recall it, did you gracefully ask for her hand, as charming as Cary Grant?

Thanks to our near-endless access to digital recording devices, the less-than-Hollywood version of you will be immortalized on the home computer, or stored for generations in some digital computing cloud.

One thing I’d like to add that’s slightly tangent to his piece is that much of our memories are directly associated with emotions. We don’t just remember the day we graduated high school, but the excitement and nervousness of finishing our childhood and the start of life as an adult. When we think about the death of a friend or family member, we remember the shock upon hearing it, the deep sadness immediately after, and our slow, non-linear path toward accepting it.

Many of these memories, too, result in new emotions that cause us to reflect on our current position in life. Thinking about high school graduation may evoke a longing to go back to high school, a nostalgia for it, or even mild satisfaction that that part of our life is finished because we’re in a much better place now. We may then consider what we did after, and where we are now; the emotions that surface due to that memory may cause us to consider our current position or current events from a different perspective than we would normally.

The emotions we associate with memories, then, are just as important as the literal event itself, or perhaps even more important. Those emotions help spur consideration about what those events mean to us and to our life, and help lead to conclusions about them. They help imbue events—things that we remember to have occurred—with personal meaning. Without those emotions, those events have very little meaning, if any at all.

I wonder, then, how recording—photo, video, captured text from conversations with people—that’s only increasing in reach and fidelity will interact with our method of remembering events and forming meaning. Will peeking back at almost any time in our past and having some kind of documentation for it make our recollection more accurate and therefore provide a deeper emotional understanding of the events and deeper conclusions about them? Will this increasingly perpetual documentation smooth out the peaks in our memory—the big events that stand out from the more mundane events—leading to less emotional analysis of them?

I don’t know. But it’s worth thinking about.