I used to have a really good long term memory for things until I started having sleep issues.
It's great to look back and have reference points for things but I think what photos do is they server as a key to unlock memories. It's like they contain parity data which allows us to remember a whole day or night or week. Some times we just need a few bit's and the memories come flowing back whole and uncorrupted.
I'm trying to catch up with that now, but I also don't want to introduce a smartphone into every experience and destroy the moment I actually wanted to capture.
After searching alot for a very compact camera I can just pull out, blindly take pictures and stow away for later review, I found the long-discontinued DxO-One being a gem. A really nice blend of good camera-hardware and ultra-compact design, at a (now) crazy-low price.
(It was initially sold at ~700 USD, but flopped and then later discontinued, but it can now still be purchased at ~110 USD as new, and that's hard to beat for a large-sensor (1" sensor) camera with a great lens (f/1.8 with mechanical iris).
I started collecting data about it, because it also has quite some potential to be hacked and customized [0]
Same thing happened to me when I went to the two most beautiful places I have been. In the second place I should have taken more fotos becausei was aware of this fact from losing all memorable memories of the first trip. In all don't look for fotos but whatever good things u see MUST be captured otherwise you will forget in 6 months
You can do both though. It's silly to go to a music concert and constantly try to film something in the chaos, instead of enjoying it. But that shouldn't stop you from taking a few pictures of you and your friends at the concert.
Mine was "I want to be experiencing life, not recording it", and recently when a large group of acquaintances were sharing memories of a particular period, I had nothing to share.
I too wish there were some more photos from my late teens/early 20s.
Of course this was all before smart phones, and now perhaps one may be justified complaining more about ubiquitous surveillance and incessant sharing online.
30 years later I now know how wrong I was. I regret not taking photos of everything I could. So many lost memories.