Are we losing our ability to remember?

During the pandemic, spending more time at home and less time having real social interactions has lead me to beleive I am forgetting some of my vocabulary or at the least not practicing it enough to keep it in what you describe as "Working memory".

Zoom and the like is far from natural and I find myself searching for words during sentences that I know I would not have in the past.

Yep, I've found I'm less effective at remembering fully detailed information but more effective at remembering 'bread crumbs' which let me quickly find the information in documentation or online. It's sort of like I store the index internally and the data table externally.

Yes but its us that live in era of weaponized attention grabbing.

People are being paid millions to figure out how to hijack your attention, how to use yourself (body, mind functions) against you.

Writing is a tool, it doesn't try to work against you, or have an agenda that might not be aligned with yours.

[Off-topic] I see the other post on Scott's blog "My summer 2020 road trip along the Italian Riviera", and I have to give impressions.

It's not the first time I hear the story along the tune of "we went on vacation, and it was so strange, everything was deserted, people were masked". There's a reason for that - it's called a pandemic, it's taking lives in the thousands per day. Yet, people still can't seem to rationalize that we shouldn't do unnecessary trips, even if we really, really need a vacation right now (and probably everybody does).

The author said they chose Italy because they were "only country that seemed to have a handle on infections". Again - that's because Italy was the hardest hit country at the start of the European side of the pandemic. It's like saying "Wuhan seems to know how to deal with the issue".

Usually, I go for the ad-hominem attack "people are too uneducated, they don't understand..." when I see this kind of behavior. But this year - I see it over and over again in highly (formally) educated (PhD-level) people, who keep track with things, are aware - and yet, can't help themselves. Scott certainly doesn't seem like a uninformed person, nor is he blind to the situation. That's the kind of contradictory examples that whisper "this isn't going to be OK, we're always going to have easy short-sighted goals that will justify the risk and make us go downhill".

I do see that Scott is the original poster, and would like to hear the rationalization beyond "we really needed a vacation".

We are really good at adapting. Today I and my phone can do better at remembering stuff I need, than me without phone 10 years ago.

Is this really a problem if you think about it from the standpoint of human evolution?