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Cyan comments on Eternal Sunshine of the Rational Mind - Less Wrong
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I resolve to not erase any memories. I want to never have to face the dilemma of wondering if something happened in my past that I had redacted. The only way to protect myself from this possible stressful situation is to believe I am not the kind of person who would ever tamper with my memories. (The "Golden Age" novels have a good depiction of the possible problems associated with discovering that you are the kind of person who has his/her memories redacted.)
Maybe I'm reaching here, but there also seems to be a parallel between the process of resolving to one-box in Newcomb's problem and that of resolving to not redact in an Eternal Sunshine scenario. It is the act of resolving, of making oneself the kind of person who one-boxes, or non-redacts, that generates the benefits, not taking the one box or actually refusing to redact memories.
So you're saying that you cannot imagine having memories so traumatic that you would prefer to erase them from your head (and, say, give yourself a written record so that you aren't tormented by the missing information). I'm not talking about a painful breakup here -- consider the most inconvenient possible world, e.g., one in which you have memories of being tortured for months or years on end.
Unless these memories cause PTSD, they're still valuable experience.
Even with memories that cause PTSD, it's not so much the forgetting that helps as the being able to reconsolidate the memories without them being hooked into trauma.
From that article, it seems that knb's original resolution to not erase any memories is doomed to failure - since the brain already erases our memories and re-writes them using something like a lossy compression scheme each time we recall them.