The Man Who Forgot Everything (On Purpose)
It began, as these things often do, with a man who wouldn’t stop writing nonsense.
Not a novelist. Not a lunatic—well, not entirely.
His name was Hermann Ebbinghaus.
To his colleagues, he was the peculiar one—the kind who sat in solitude whispering “WID” and “ZOF” to himself, testing how long he could remember a string of meaningless syllables before they dissolved into mental fog.
He wasn’t studying memory in a lab rat. He was the rat.
A self-experimenter. A one-man experiment.
Each trial was a step deeper into cognitive unravelling.
But in his hands, what seemed like madness became mapmaking.
He charted a phenomenon that would quietly define learning for the next 150 years: the Forgetting Curve—a graph not of failure, but of inevitability.
We forget. Rapidly. Predictably. And, if left to nature, permanently.
But what if forgetting wasn’t a flaw?
What if it was a signal? A guide?
What if it told us exactly when to remember?
Agent Zeta: The Memory as Identity Test
In a cold bunker beneath a city that officially didn’t exist, Agent Zeta sat alone.
His mission briefing was unlike any other.
He wasn’t told what to do. He was told who to become.
“You are Pavel Antonov. Born in Novosibirsk. Father was a metallurgist.
You studied orchestral composition before being recruited into regional intelligence.”
They gave him 72 hours.
Not to memorize.
To embody.
Every fact, a fiber of a new self.
Every repetition, a carving deeper into identity.
Every missed recall? A potential death sentence.
The training used a technique most civilians know from flashcards and apps:
Spaced Repetition.
But this wasn’t about passing tests. This was about surviving interrogation.
Imagine you’re held at gunpoint.
“What was the name of your childhood piano teacher?” the enemy asks.
You blink. You stall. You die.
In the field, hesitation is betrayal.
You don’t know the answer—you are the answer.
Because it’s been practiced under heat.
1 hour.
4 hours.
24.
1 week.
Each retrieval—a hammer strike against the decay.
The Civilian Collapse: Why We Forget Who We Are
Now cut to us.
The ordinary. The over-notified. The endlessly distracted.
We wake up.
We scroll.
We forget.
400 notifications before breakfast.
A thousand names, ideas, dreams and half-built ambitions dissolving like sugar in rain.
Modern life is a cognitive fog.
Not because we don’t know things,
but because we never revisit them.
We learn for moments. We remember for hours.
But to become something?
To change a behavior?
To master a thought?
That takes deliberate repetition.
We aren’t losing memory.
We’re losing identity.
What if we stopped treating memory as trivia, and started treating it as code?
Memory as a Design Medium
Let’s make this clear:
Spaced Repetition isn’t a study hack. It’s design.
It’s UX for the self.
It’s memory architecture.
It’s behavior scripting through time.
You are not what you believe.
You are what you repeatedly retrieve.
That’s how your brain wires itself.
Think about it:
- You don’t fall in love—you rehearse it.
- You don’t become brave—you recall courage when tested.
- You don’t stay skilled—you practice decay-resistance.
Memory is identity.
And Spaced Repetition is identity’s glue.
Imagine designing your product onboarding, not as dumping features, but installing habits.
Or relationships, as cycles of revisiting meaningful moments, before they fade.
Even faith, confidence, grief, and purpose—all are subject to the forgetting curve.
All can be shaped if we know when to re-see them.
Madness or Mastery? A Thought Experiment
Consider two men.
One mutters nonsense syllables in a library, tracking how long he can remember gibberish.
The other speaks six languages, navigates complex systems effortlessly, and remembers every name.
You’d call the first man mad.
You’d call the second a genius.
What if they’re the same man?
Separated only by time and interval?
Ebbinghaus wasn’t a curiosity. He was an early adopter.
He used madness to map the invisible.
Today, we dismiss obsessives as unbalanced.
But the line between obsession and insight is often institutional delay.
It’s only mad until it works.
It’s only crazy until it trains spies.
Designing Your Agent Protocol
Let’s turn this from narrative to manual.
Here’s how to live like Agent Zeta.
Here’s how to install an identity using Spaced Repetition:
- Name your mission.Are you becoming a parent, an artist, a founder? Define it. Give it a cover identity.
- Break it into cards.Each skill, fact, behavior gets a card. Like an agent’s briefing.
- Use interval scheduling.Revisit on day 1, day 3, day 7, day 14. Use software—or a notebook with time stamps.
- Practice under tension.Recall facts tired. Under pressure. Mid-chaos. Burn them in.
- Get weird.Make your rituals personal. Laughably odd. Emotion encodes memory.
- Keep files active.Every week, archive what’s stable. Review what’s fading. Build a self that doesn’t flinch.
This isn’t memorization.
This is operational architecture for becoming.
The Curve Isn’t the Enemy
The Forgetting Curve isn’t your adversary.
It’s your map.
It tells you when to strike.
When to rehearse.
When to become.
Ebbinghaus charted the decay.
Wozniak built the algorithm.
Zeta ran the drills.
You?
You get the power to design a mind worth remembering.
Forget the hacks.
Forget the noise.
Build the you that returns on cue.
This design investigation is part of The Deductionists—a league of legendary thinkers unraveling the paradoxical and peculiar. Because if we don’t question it, who will?
🎙 Hear more irreverent insights on The Deductionists Podcast—available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and anywhere you get your podcasts.
🔗 Listen now:
👉 Apple Podcasts
👉 Spotify
Subscribe to the Newsletter on LinkedIn: The Deductionists Newsletter.