We are doing RAG in LIFE.
Lately, while submitting resumes and diving into RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) technology, I realized—it’s essentially about compression and filtering of data: keeping what’s important, maintaining relevance, discarding the rest. That’s actually pretty enlightening. Every day, we’re doing information filtering—tagging people and things, setting priorities. But sometimes, in the process, we end up "compressing" away something truly precious.
Faced with the overwhelming flood of people and events, we slowly learn to assign vector tags to everything: this is urgent, that can wait; this person matters, that one’s connection can fade; this moment should be remembered, that one can be forgotten.
The Cost of Vector Drift
But sometimes, we fragment life so much that we lose the context, the original intention. Things that once mattered begin to lose their link.
Group chats that once lit up with laughter, roommates we used to see first thing in the morning, classmates who sat beside us for years—the conversations ended with just a “hahaha”.
It’s not that they stopped being important. It’s just that our vector coordinates have drifted apart.
We keep recalculating similarity scores. New jobs, new environments, new goals—they all shift our attention vectors. People who were once tightly linked to us, in both body and soul, are now being pulled away by the gravity of change.
Active Retrieval
Maybe what we need is a moment of active retrieval—not waiting passively for the system to recommend something, but actively digging up those deeply buried vectors in memory.
Send a message to an old friend, ask how they’ve been;
Flip through old photos, recall the joy they captured;
Or simply admit: some things shouldn’t be compressed.
After all, maybe the true meaning of life is hidden in those "marginally relevant" pieces of data.
Life is a RAG—curation matters, but don’t forget: some things aren’t valuable because they’re relevant, but because they once made us feel. 🌟