When something’s “on the tip of your tongue.”
When you thought of something but you lost it.
When you have an idea that’s almost complete but you know there’s more (like the tip of a glacier).
You sit there and rack your brain and try to remember what you can’t. And you’re faced with a decision: whether to stick with it or just forget and move on.
The opportunity cost of spending time remembering is the time that we might otherwise spend thinking of something new.
On a macro scale, this is living in the past and ignoring the present. Recalling memories instead of making new ones.
On a micro scale, this is working on a bug in your code or writing a new scene for your novel or anything else that requires creativity and problem solving. And you forget a new idea or good solution. You know there are other ideas and other solutions but you like the one you had, so you try to get it back; all the while, you’re losing out on the others.
Most of the time you should just forget and move on, I think.
For some of us the moving on part….. Oh so hard to do. But I like the idea of it.