There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018)

The concept of an antimeme has been living rent free in my head (which is quite ironic) ever since I first read this piece back then. Easily my favorite tale from the SCP universe.

I know right?

Then you start wondering if you, or anybody, have forgotten anything so important that it would shatter your world.

And would you ever know? Is there any way to ever know?

What if the past changes as much as the future?

What if that's the Mandela effect?

Have you seen the documentary "7 second memory man" on BBC.

It is about an intelligent person who is confined to live with only 7 second memory. He keeps a diary recording his entries. As he reads past entries, he realises the predicament he is in and considers that his case would be interesting to doctors. Then forgets all about that. Rediscovering the whole thing again in the next 7 seconds for himself anew.

44:20 @ https://youtu.be/k_P7Y0-wgos

7 seconds is a nightmare, barely just enough time to suffer in a loop.

There are people who have discovered that their parents lied about their baby stories and instead they were part of mass kidnappings/government schemes, like Liebensborn and the disappeared children in Argentina and Spain. Or more individual stories, like "My mom is actually my grandma". These days the professional advice is not to keep that secret from your adopted children precisely because the revelation itself can be much more damaging than the knowledge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_children_of_Francoism

It's called "repression". It's a rather studied thing in psychological circles. Can cause all sorts of messes.

Solution is usually liberal application of therapy, hard work, persistence, and a little luck.

Equating existential pondering with mental illness is a dangerous slippery slope.

Most recent is the two kids of exchanged Russian spies who learned they are not Argentinians while on the plane to Moscow.

Perhaps I worded that poorly. I was trying to express that there exist various psychological mechanisms specifically involved with isolating existentially destabilizing mental events from the conscious cognitive process to maintain it's integrity and ability to function, and what one of their names were. I tacked on the end the list of remedies applied traditionally when such mechanisms for whatever reason end up going awry. Those cases are undeniably a form of mental illness.

This instance of a poster's existential pondering is not mental illness. It's a valid question. The answer was yes. See repression, then research other cognitive distortions. It's part of building up a healthy meta-cognition.