Remember that one episode of Weird Science where Gary wished he had a remote control for life, so he could fast forward through the boring parts? I kind of wish my life had a fast forward button. Then I could skip over all those weeks and months where nothing good happens and go right to the interesting parts. Skip right over to First Kiss, or First True Love. I already know nothing good is going to happen in the next week.
The problem with that is that Gary didn't remember what happened in the parts he fast-forwarded over. But I don't think that's actually possible. From what we saw of what happened afterwards he was living through the skipped time and acting like himself. During that time period he must have had memories. Otherwise he would have been constantly forgetting what was going on, like a person with anterograde amnesia. Then again, maybe he was. We didn't see the parts he skipped over either.
You might think that if you still remember the parts you wanted to skip then it's no different from if you really lived through them. I don't think so, though. First of all, there's the fact that pain dulls with time. The memory of loneliness isn't nearly as intense. Then there's what I like to call "time compression". Nothing to do with Final Fantasy VIII. That's just my way of saying that when I remember periods of time where nothing interesting happened they don't seem to have taken as long as they actually did, even though they seemed interminable when I was living through them. I guess that's because there was nothing worth forming memories about. Just like file compression; you store a representative portion and make a note that it repeated for 12 hours. Or even leave out that note, since human memory isn't intended to be lossless. Brains are very efficient little devices. I hope one day I can write an artificial intelligence program that works so well.