Wealth & Money Quote by Jon Wynne-Tyson

Wynne-Tyson flips the usual self-help fantasy of memory as a bigger hard drive. His provocation is that recall is less about intake than refusal: the mind gets sharp not by hoarding facts, but by policing them. Coming from an activist, that’s not a neutral cognitive tip; it’s a political warning about attention as a scarce resource. Movements rise or stall on what they can keep in focus and, just as crucially, what they decline to dignify.

The line works because it smuggles a moral choice into a topic we treat as mechanical. “Wish to reject” makes forgetting sound voluntary, even principled. That’s the subtext: memory is edited, and the editor has motives. We don’t just misremember; we curate. In a media environment that competes to deposit outrage, trivia, and manufactured urgency into our heads, Wynne-Tyson suggests effectiveness looks like filtration. Not everything deserves to become part of your internal archive, because what sticks shapes what you can act on.

There’s a double edge here. Rejection can be liberating (protecting clarity, preventing manipulation), but it can also be the gateway drug to denial. Activism demands both: the discipline to ignore noise and the courage not to “reject” inconvenient facts about one’s own side, one’s own complicity, one’s own fatigue. The quote lands as a reminder that memory isn’t a trophy cabinet; it’s a battlefield over what gets to count as reality.