From the question you're asking, it's clear you're in a little over your head here. A lot has happened with react in the last couple years, including the introduction of hooks. They're great, we all love to use them in our functional components, however I'd take a moment to read the react documentation on how state works in both functional and class components just to get a basic understanding of how stateful components work. Understanding how state works in class components, which used to be the only kind of components, (before the introduction of hooks,) will make much more sense if you're new to react. It's really easy to see and understand the benefit of hooks/functional components once you understand the core concepts of state mgmt etc. Writing a class component or two will give you a clear idea of what hooks are doing "under the hood" and why you need a special function to update state etc. There's actually a modern, high level JavaScript feature called array destructuring behind the simple: const [state, setState] = useState(initialState) this basically equates to: const state = initialState const setState = helper function from react In short RTFM but ultimately I'd suggest writing one or two class components without hooks to get a sense of what state does for a component and how components work in the react virtual document object model(DOM). EDITs: way too many you probably won't read/need. More on reddit.com

The "remembering" happens outside of your function. When you call setState(), React maintain's it's own internal store where they keep track of values, and updates it there. It then it re-renders by calling App(), running your entire function again So when you are doing useState(), you are basically just asking react "Give me the current value of the [first] state variable used in the App component" and "Give me a function that lets me change it". So the value "count" here isn't the actual count that you can modify, but just the current value of what is in React's store when App() was ran. A tiny way to visualize it is as this: const getCount = () => 1; function App() { const count = getCount(); } More on reddit.com

Hey Guys! Are you learning React at the moment ? This video is perfect for you! You will see how useState hook works inside a react functional… More on reddit.com

Yes, but... Could the component be split into smaller single-purpose components that encapsulate their own logic? Are you deriving state? Do you have a chain of useEffect dependencies that could be collapsed into a single operation? Are you using useState where you could just set a variable value (or useMemo if it's a complex operation). Could you extract bundles of related logic into custom hooks or vanilla functions to clean up your component and make your code more reusable? More on reddit.com