false memories

I have a confession to make. I’m just as guilty of self-delusion as the next (link). The other day someone asked me if I had been ‘surprised’ by the dot com crash of 2001. I was working in the computer industry back then and believed it was the ‘wave of the future’. So yeah, I was surprised. However, that’s not what I told him. I told him no, I wasn’t surprised ..and went on to explain how I had seen it coming. “Companies weren’t ready to abandon their way of doing business for the promise of e-commerce” I said “..even our own clients were backing away from some of the ambitious shit we were proposing.” Funny thing is, I wasn’t lying ..not intentionally anyway. That’s actually how I remember it. On closer inspection it’s clear to me what’s happening. I had replaced memories of what I was thinking before the crash with my accounts of it afterwards ..creating the illusion that I had seen it coming. What’s more, now that I think about it ..another fucked-up consequence of underestimating the surprise I felt was how it had kept me from recognizing warning signs of the next ‘big thing’ ..which was real estate before the market crash of 2007.