>[!abstract] >The recentism that results from our experiential memory being lifespan-bound (i.e., on the order of a few decades). Our lifespans are long enough to learn a useful chunk of humanity's body of knowledge, but too short to properly *internalize* lessons from previous generations. Humans keep reinventing the proverbial wheel and repeating the same mistakes because their memory and experience spans only a lifetime. This is true at the individual level, where every newborn has to learn everything from scratch, and every person who dies instantly loses all that they have learned. It is also true at the group level, where History rhymes (see the [[Strauss–Howe generational theory]]) due to the collective forgetfulness of humans about their past, and their inability to build *upon* it. Humanity is a *project* that spans millennia but its *members* span a few decades. This collective phenomenon of constant memory attrition is frighteningly wasteful in its consequences.