Perhaps given the author's familial experiences with the tragedy of Alzheimers, it's a sort of therapy.

I'm not saying it's effective, but perhaps doing such an exercise and having it lead to the circular "remembering nothing but remembering", it might help folks empathise with the fallibility of the mind when others suffer a disease like Alzheimers.

Or maybe the author is just a curious sort. Either way, not my place to judge.

In fact the research on memorization shows that only a constant amount of time is needed to retain a given fact indefinitely, because the interval between reinforcements can rise exponential. So you can commit a fixed amount of time per day to this practice and retain everything, it does not necessary need to fill up your entire day. Though you are right it seems the author is using a different approach and is struggling with the accretion to some degree.

Reminds me of a Borges story (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funes_the_Memorious, https://vigeland.caltech.edu/ist4/lectures/funes%20borges.pd...) and the article also led me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia — “Price has stated that she, like Funes, views her memory as a curse”.

I came here for this, and I'm glad you beat me to it. I never knew about hyperthymesia though, and it seems shocking that there have been persons affected by it, and it sounds like Borges was in fact prescient.

Reminds me of the ending of 'The Masochistic Playpen' (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/338429.The_Masochistic_P...), in which the protagonist is forced to re-watch every single day of his life from conception, realizing that at some point if he lives long enough he will get to the point where has to re-watch himself re-watching his entire life, a sort of "squaring" of the tedium.