What Gopifications taught me about life

I thought they were nothing more than silly, sly tweets. They were not meant to be life-changing. Imagine my surprise when a life changed—and it turned out to be mine

There was a time when Elon Musk did not own Twitter. Facebook and Instagram had been revealed to be scavengers making money by selling our personal lives to the highest bidders. But, Twitter was all right, I liked it.

I tweeted my wisdom and wit regularly to my 5,000 or so followers. Sometime in November 2017, I began tweeting one-liners, sometimes philosophical, sometimes sardonic. Irony and sarcasm towards no-one in particular.

I called them Gopifications. The one-liners came unpredictably, unconnected to each other. I numbered them arbitrarily, starting with Gopification #73, which read You can’t stop watering a plant just because it turned out to be a cactus.

Some Gopifications felt clumsy and laboured (Trying to be different from their parents, parents do the very things that make their children not want to be like them) but some others felt positively inspirational and, if I may confess, brilliant, #16 — A friend in need can take everything you’ve got.

#151 — Up and down is a matter of opinion when you live on a round planet.

#109 —  Dogs are some of the best human beings.

#78 — Angry drivers create traffic jams. Traffic jams create angry drivers.

Gopifications were meant to be silly and sly, not life-changing. Imagine my surprise when a life changed—and it turned out to be mine.

One day, after an attack of cleverness, I tweeted out this: A day that you cannot remember is a day that you did not live.

Then I started thinking—how many of my own days could I remember? How much had I really lived? The answer was chastening. 

Most of us live treadmill lives, doing the same things day after day, so monotonous and predictable that there seems to be no point in remembering them. For example, can you remember what you did three days ago, on October 29? Unless it was something unusual or uncommon, chances are you’re scratching your head.

It’s an inconvenient truth. Most of our days go by in a haze, lost to memory once they pass. We remember highlights, special events, milestones, life-changing moments. Yesterday is a blur. But the day before yesterday is already blank, flat, featureless and forgotten.

The banality of our lives has been measured by scientists. We have the metrics.

You will spend 33 of your 79 years in bed asleep. Seven of those years will be spent struggling to sleep.

You will work an average of 13 years two months.

You’ll spend 11 years four months staring at a screen. Three of those years, that screen will be your phone’s.

You’ll eat (4.5 years), have vacations (3 years), work out (about 1.3 years) and romance (a mere one year one month).

Subtract all these routine activities from your life span  and you will be left with about eight years unaccounted for. A full 2,997 days of life that you lived, doing something not routinebut now forgotten forever.

No good. This had to change.

On June 23, 2012, I downloaded an app called Day One, determined that no more days would go forgotten into the mist. Since then, I have recorded each day, its mundane details, its reflections, its delights, its sorrows. My journal is 12 years old now.

When phones became cameras, I began including photos, and then videos. Moments with my children, the kindness of strangers, the surprises waiting around unexpected corners and the warmth of good-fellowship with friends and loved ones at the day’s end.

There were bad times too—heartbreaks, loneliness, fear, despair, sometimes hope and renewal. Everything was faithfully noted. As my diary habit grew, I noticed my life changing by degrees. 

I dreaded writing Just another day. Nothing to report. I found myself seeking out new experiences, going places I had not walked, smiling at strangers, saying yes to the unexpected, all so that I would have a story to tell my diary at night.

One day, something came out of the clear blue sky. My journal app has a feature that tells you what you were doing on the same day in previous years. I took my daughter out for a pizza one day—my app told me that I’d eaten out with her on the same day thrice in the previous seven years. It seemed I’d had nosebleeds on certain days year after year. Fancy that. Some recurrences were trivial, others were grand, such as getting a new job (for some reason always in July).

Keeping this diary has changed me profoundly. I now search for patterns when I look back on my life. Why, I want to know, have I had to deal four times with the funeral rites of someone I had not known while they lived? Why is it that all those I consider my mentors were aged 52 when they came into my life? Why do the strangers I meet keeping showing up again and again in my life, sometimes years later? What am I meant to learn from these patterns?

Here’s what I am learning: the unexamined life is utterly forgettable. It becomes memorable only when you decide to make it memorable.

You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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