I make a conscious effort to forget stuff.
I will add that now that I am older, my photographic memory isn't so photographic.;-) Too much information. My memory has a 5-minute latency.
“For most of my life, I have had a photographic memory. I can still remember my phone numbers from 70 years ago (whether I want to or not).”
Actually I have been cursed with the same. Just about everything I ever read in my life is still stored in my archives. But as I get older it is becoming harder to recall it from the archives even though it is still there. My problem comes from not even taking a minute to read it in the first place. Like phone numbers. Someone texts it to me, I make a few clicks to put it in my contacts folder, but I never really did pay any attention to what that number actually was. Never even made it a point to read the number, just clicked and added a name.
Here is where the problem lies... We stop even paying attention or making it a point because we no longer need to. In which case it was never even read or memorized in the first place. You can’t remember something you never made it a point to try and memorize.