A scrapbook takes hours nobody sees. Forty years later it’s the most valuable thing in the house.

Some work pays out on such a long delay that it barely feels like work worth doing. Nobody claps while you are cutting out ticket stubs, and the whole afternoon looks wasted from across the room. Decades later it is the object people pull off the shelf first, because it is the only record anybody kept of that year.

Start the low-effort version. A shoebox, a folder on your phone, a notes file with one line a day. Craft is not the point. The point is that somebody is keeping a record, and right now that has to be you.