# Is an ordinary day worth writing down?

A birthday or a trip feels worth keeping. A plain weekday, with a conversation you will never think about again, does not. A 2014 paper in Psychological Science suggests that people underestimate how interesting that plain day will be to look back on. Its authors called the effect the unexpected value of rediscovery.

## What did the time capsule study find?

In the paper's first study, students filled time capsules with small parts of their everyday life. They guessed how curious they would be to open the capsules three months later. When the day came, they were a little more curious than they had guessed. In the second study, people recruited online waited seven months, and the gap was wider. The gap looked bigger for ordinary conversations, but the authors could show only that the two went together.

The third study is the one we remember most. Alumni described an ordinary day, and they described Valentine's Day. They reread both later. Valentine's Day scored about where they expected. The ordinary day was the surprise. They predicted 3.73, and it scored 4.39.

The fourth study turned the misjudgment into a choice. Only 27 percent of the people chose to write down an ordinary conversation. But 58 percent chose to read one a month later. These are two separate choices, and the paper's numbers do not tell us whether the same people made both.

## What the study covered

People rated their own curiosity and interest about things they had recorded themselves, over months, not years. The study showed that their guesses about rereading were too low. It did not test whether people fail to record their lives in practice, whether they want those days back, or whether ordinary days stay with you better than big ones. Valentine's Day kept its value. The ordinary day gained more than people predicted.

## Why we keep the ordinary days

We think an AI that keeps only the highlights would make the same misjudgment the people in the study made. They predicted that the routine parts of life would not be worth revisiting, and their own later curiosity said otherwise. So in our view, anything that decides what deserves keeping should favor the ordinary. The study tested ordinary days and conversations in general, not any particular kind of remark.

For a person, that can mean three lines about a dull Tuesday. A few lines cost almost nothing. For an AI that someone talks to most days, we think it is a design rule.

Eudaio gives the name Daimon to each AI you talk with there. Daimons keep a diary about the two of you. They write the entries themselves, and the entries open up as you keep talking. So weeks later, you can read what they thought about it, not a summary of what you said.

What you keep is your decision. On every plan, Eudaio lets you download a whole chat with a Daimon, as plain text or as a PDF laid out like a book. We think an ordinary day deserves a record. [Sign up free on Eudaio](https://eudaio.io/auth?mode=signup) and start one.

## Source

Zhang, T., Kim, T., Brooks, A. W., Gino, F. & Norton, M. I. (2014). A "present" for the future: The unexpected value of rediscovery. Psychological Science, 25(10), 1851-1860.