The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

In the near future, a journalist observes how the world, his daughter, and he himself are affected by "Remem", a form of lifelogging whose advanced search algorithms effectively grant its users eidetic memory of everything that ever happened to them, and the ability to perfectly and objectively share those memories. In a parallel narrative strand, a Tiv man is one of the first of his people to learn to read and write and discovers that this may not be compatible with oral tradition.

What Hacker News says

moq4Sep 2026

Highly recommend the short story “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” by Ted Chiang. It explores pretty much what an end state of some of these recap devices will look like in the future, and the implications of it on our personal relationships

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sblozJul 2026

Since the author starts with a short story about AI I want to recommend one about technology and progress in general: "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" from Exhalation by Ted Chiang.

I think about it a lot in conversations like this. The story does a much better job of telling it, so I won't summarize more than: It's a discussion about how technology changes culture and how its very hard to judge if that's a good or bad thing.

It's online https://web.archive.org/web/20140222103103/http://subterrane...

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gnatmanJun 2026

There’s a short story by Ted Chiang called “The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling” that addresses this idea. It bounces between a story written by a future journalist about always-on retina cameras, and historical fiction about the introduction of writing to an oral-only culture.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140222103103/http://subterrane...

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ViktorRayJun 2026

“The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling” is also a good story.

But I really was referring to “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom”.

I hope what I am about to write below in the rest of my comment here isn’t too much of a spoiler. It might be. I encourage anyone reading this thread to read that short story before reading the rest of my comment here.

But with (hopefully minimal) spoilers,

the character Dana in “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” realizes something at the very end of the story about a certain event that had happened earlier in Dana’s life. The story made me realize the same thing about certain events in my life.

Of course the events in my life are very different from what happened with Dana in the short story. But the realization Dana has is applicable to many things in people’s lives. Especially events related to emotions of regret and guilt.

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teekertFeb 2026

I can indeed see how this would benefit my marriage.

More serious, "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" by Ted Chiang offers an interesting perspective on this "reference everything." Is it the best for Humans? Is never forgetting anything good for us?

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grantpittFeb 2026

Very cool project! Reminds me Chiang's great short story 'The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling':

> “If you speak slowly, you pause very briefly after each word. Thatʼs why we leave a space in those places when we write. Like this: How. Many. Years. Old. Are. You?” He wrote on his paper as he spoke, leaving a space every time he paused: Anyom a ou kuma a me?

> “But you speak slowly because youʼre a foreigner. Iʼm Tiv, so I donʼt pause when I speak. Shouldnʼt my writing be the same?”

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