We may lose our memory as we get older, but this might not be such a bad thing - who wants to drag a mental ju... — Michael Leunig

We may lose our memory as we get older, but this might not be such a bad thing - who wants to drag a mental junkyard around at a time of life when you're starting to grow interesting little wings?

Author: Michael Leunig

Insight: There's something freeing about this idea, especially when we live in a culture obsessed with holding onto everything. We're supposed to remember every slight, every mistake we made in 1997, every reason we're supposed to feel bad about ourselves. Memory gets weaponized—we beat ourselves with it, let it define who we are. Leunig flips this around and suggests that forgetting might actually be a feature, not a bug. The real insight isn't just about age. It's that we have permission to let things go before we get old. We don't have to carry every grudge, every failure, every "what if" into our next chapter. The mental junkyard he's talking about isn't just memories—it's all the weight we've decided matters. The baggage that kept us small, careful, playing it safe because we remembered why we shouldn't try. When you stop dragging all that around, something shifts. You become lighter. More willing to be weird, to experiment, to grow those little wings. That's not just a gift of aging. It's available to anyone right now who decides their history doesn't have to be their cage.