"The Overly Documented Life" Analysis

                  A.J. Jacobs, the author of “The Overly Documented Life” writes about what daily life is like for a middle class person in Americas society today. Specifically, what every waking second is like. He speaks about how our memory tends to be short lived with all of the other things that we have to do and remember. To try to document his memories, he attaches a small camera to the side of his head to record everything he sees throughout his day, including him using the bathroom and staring at other women. In doing so, he is more carefully and self-conscious about what he looks at as he doesn’t want to look back on what he did and saw that day and be embarrassed. In this project, he also states the benefits of lifelogging such as finding the taxi that his left his belongings in and rewinding the tape to see if he had taken an Advil for his headache. In doing so, he is following one of Huxley’s three directions which is towards the personal, autobiographical, and inner experience. He shares specific details about what he did each day and how it made him feel. In doing so, he lets the reader know how he directly feels and the reader will then feel a deeper connection to the writer. He also writes this article is a very comical sense which is beneficial towards his cause of bringing awareness to how much we really tend to forget or ignore things in our everyday life. If it was written in a very dry way, the article would lose speed very quickly and the reader would most likely stop reading after a few paragraphs. He is also very relatable with his experiences that he states in the article like losing his wallet. Most people understand frantically looking for their wallet, wishing that they had a device that would basically remind them where they put it. Altogether, the article was very entertaining and brings up a valid point that we need to be more aware of how much that we really do and what we say in our everyday life.