Imagine suddenly you no longer exist, poof, from one day to the next there is no more you.
What if you knew that this day would come in a month?
What if it wasn’t for another year?
Or in 5 years?
Would you spend your remaining time differently than you do now?
If so, why aren’t you already doing it?
I’d put more effort into recording family history. Why aren’t I doing so now? Because it’s a lot of work and I don’t have anyone to help me with it. It includes scanning photos, scanning negatives, and labeling and organizing all the pictures; converting reel-to-reel takes, mini-cassettes and audio cassettes to digital, and labeling those; converting VHS to DVD and labeling those; finding and transcribing family recipes and organizing them into an annotated cookbook; transcribing old letters from the early to late 1900’s in various handwriting styles, and every medium from faded pencil to blotted fountain pen to hurriedly scrawled ballpoint, in everything from tissue-thin airmail paper to fragile student notepaper to cat-pee’d-upon cards; and writing a short biography of the various people who are pictured, recorded, written, etc, in all the various media.
Get it done now so you don’t have to worry about it later.
I said I’d put more effort into the work, not that I was putting no effort into it. Like, my grandad was an amateur photographer and I have all these negatives of his work. I can’t afford the money to get them scanned professionally (so many negatives!), but I bought a pro-sumer grade negative scanner and am scanning them myself. Unfortunately, as I said, there are a lot of negatives, and it takes me around one hour to process each roll. It’s gonna take me another year to scan all the negatives.
Then I have an entire bookcase of photographs that need to be scanned (only a small subset of these are granddad’s work). Again, I can’t afford to get them scanned professionally, but I have a decent scanner for the PC, so that’s what I’m working with, but it’ll take a long time to scan in and process all those photos.
My uncle was a professor and the university taped some of his lectures; a different aunt was a very small-time actress and has maybe 200 VHS tapes of her performances. Granddad was a local musician, so we have some audio tapes of that. Etc, etc, etc.
Everything needs time and concentration, and I’m only one person. It’s gonna take me years to finish everything.