Why Can't Life Be Like TiVo?

By Martha Beck
TiVo

If only our best and worst experiences were rewindable, fast-forwardable, deletable. Hey, pause: They are!

"Why," a friend asked me the other day, "can't life be like TiVo?" She wanted to know why we can't just program ourselves to scan reality for experiences we're going to love and avoid things we'll hate. Why can't we replay situations we want to relive or that we missed the first time through?

I paused SpongeBob SquarePants for a fleeting moment of actual thought. My own response surprised me. You see, I believe life does work like TiVo. You may not realize that capabilities such as automatic search, record, replay, and fast-forward come standard with your brain. Learning how to use them can improve your experience of life as much as my handy new device has increased my enjoyment of television (I can operate about three functions on my actual TiVo, but they bring me a happiness I once thought could come only from, say, finding true love or becoming a good person). So let's consider the perceptual technology you've had between your ears since the moment you were born.