Picture This, kid

Because the Internet certainly does, even though I just pulled the date out of a hat.

On This Day tells us it's not a date without controversy. Jennifer Lawrence won Best Actress for her role in Silver Linings Playbook (Let's put a pin in the concept of a silver lining, and see if we can circle back to it later). Soldiers were killed in a skirmish in Mali. Danica Patrick became the first woman to ever start from pole position at Daytona.

But do you remember 24th of February 2013? What did you have for breakfast? What were you wearing? Were you happy? Sad? Was it a day to forget? (Have another of those pins? Stick it in the concept of forgetting.)

If you keep a diary you might know those things. If you write often, you probably have a few lines from that day. If you write more seldom you might even remember it, because just the act of choosing what to write down, what to save – creating a narrative – helps etch the memory, story in your mind. At least the parts you wanted to remember.

If you don’t keep a diary, see if you have any pictures. You probably do, since by 2013, everyone had a camera in their phone. You have photos of receipts, funny dogs, beautiful views – things you want to remember. From that specific day? Probably just a few. Even with the possibility of unlimited digital photos you still choose. It's an act of curation.

But there is one subject for which we don't curate. Kids. Because nowadays? If you are a parent, you take photos of them All. The. Time. But it wasn't always like this.

My children will have thousands of images from their childhood. As for me?

My granddad used to work as a photojournalist. He took photos with guerillas in South America, covered Olympic games around the world, documented state visits to Sweden, shot portraits of authors. And documented his family.

My dad used to not work as a photojournalist. He took pictures of things he found interesting. Or beautiful. Like his family.

Yet these family photos are few and far between. And moving pictures are even rarer. They are so few that they are all part of the mythos of my family. Like the clip in which I can't remember the lyrics to the children's song "Bockarna Bruse" and my sister, one and a half years younger and very much ready to steal the limelight, tells me "Will you sing? Or go away? Or should I get mad at you?" with a deadpan voice. That whole clip, one of just a few surviving (or ever recorded!) has come to explain both our personalities and our relationship, for decades. The scarcity made them iconic.

I have probably hundreds of pictures from the first few days of my firstborn daughter's life. And then it hardly lets up. Every day something new happened so I took a few more. As did my wife. Every day she was a beautiful baby. So I took a few more. As did my wife. Then the cute sounds came. So we both started filming.

There are gigabytes of clips and pictures from those first few days, weeks and years. A few have come close to becoming iconic but they are almost drowning among the rest. The rest kept as insurance. And as refreshers? Nick Hornby wrote in his book "31 Songs" that if you truly want to feel how it felt to listen to the Beatles again when they first broke through, you have to listen to the song Rain. Because it's probably the song you've heard the least, so it has not been layered with years and years of nostalgia, memories and external meaning. And sometimes a photo you've not looked at to death can jog your memory in the same way. But in the end there is just so much. More than will ever be needed to tell her story. What will that do to my memories? To hers?

The fact is that my kids will have images from almost every day of their lives. Not curated, not just exceptional moments — just the flow of existence, captured. Just there. In that flow, no single one can become the anchor.

So, what is the right amount of pictures telling you who you are?

Let's play a game. Say "stop" when you've reached your limit: No pictures at all. A few per year. A few per month. Per week. Per day. Per hour. Per minute. A movie from behind your eyes — every moment captured, your memory outsourced to an SD card or to the cloud, and every moment is there for you to rewind to.

The sweet spot isn't fixed. It's personal, cultural and most probably shifting. But will we notice when we cross it? And how do we decide when it comes to others?

All I keep coming back to in my head is that logging every meal and every nap and all our progress is something done in hospitals.

This isn't about public sharing. Not about whether it's right showing your kids to the world without their consent. It is all about that ever-swelling private archive, where their childhoods exist outside themselves — in files, on drives. They can visit it more completely than they can remember it. At some point, they'll inherit this evidence of who they were. Is that a gift?

At the latest end-of-term ceremony at my eldest's preschool I thought about bringing a camera. Sure, preschools are photo-free zones nowadays in Sweden. Protecting the kids' privacy and all. Protecting them from others. But if I brought one I could take a couple of photos later on, perhaps on the way home? Gilded photos, early summer, with soft particles floating in the air.

In the end I didn't.

Because maybe the photo restrictions do more than protect our kids from others. Maybe a side effect is that preschools have become a refuge from the constant accumulation of checkable facts of us growing up. That's fitting in a way. Because much of what is happening during a day in preschool is not possible to capture with a camera anyway. All the moments of play, inside the minds of the kids, creating narratives. Real fake memories. Making shit up. Just like all memories used to be.

We used to fear being forgotten. Then the digital world came and we started to fear the opposite. A world that would never forget us. Now I'm starting to wonder if what we should fear isn't being forgotten or remembered by others, but a world in which we can't forget ourselves.

So maybe the kids will be thankful for that rule in the future. It makes preschool a place where not everything is documented for the future. A place for memories, not memorabilia. We lose some fidelity but gain freedom from the weight of knowing for certain. A place and time we can recreate fondly and hazily but are allowed to forget.

What's lost when nothing is lost? Negative space. The gaps where stories grow. The freedom of unrecorded existence. The chance to become someone without endless evidence of who you were.

A smaller inheritance. Now that's a silver lining.

(If I remembered the arc of Silver Linings Playbook at all I could probably make this a tighter callback, but as we've learned by now there is grace to forgetting. You can return all your pins now.)