The Link Between Memory, Purpose, and Survival: Lessons from Dementia

A note to young leaders.

I recently sat next to a dementia carer at a dinner party.

Dementia is a debilitating mental disease. What’s less known, she told me, is that dementia is also very detrimental to the patient’s physical well-being – and if it occurs at a young age, it severely curtails life expectancy.

Why, I wondered, would dementia affect life expectancy? Then it suddenly made a lot of sense to me.
Loss of memory is loss of identity. Loss of identity is loss of purpose. Loss of purpose leads to a loss of the will to live.

What is true of the individual is also true of families, corporates and nations.

To forget our history is to abandon our sense of destiny, and without that, extinction is near at hand.