“I save all my texts and photos. But do I really need them?,” asks the headline of an article in The Guardian by Adrian Horton, about the phenomenon of digital hoarding. She describes her personal crisis of losing a BlackBerry phone that “held my high school text messages that was crucial evidence of my life.” “Crucial” is a bit dramatic, but it appears that, at one point before, she truly believed those messages to be of vital importance.
She also writes:
I don’t have this compulsion to save in the physical realm, where I regularly purge outdated, irrelevant items with little thought. But I am sentimental, and identify with what experts call “digital hoarding”—accumulating excess digital material to the point of causing stress and anxiety.
The driving force is emotional, rather than practical. Digital hoarding is about fending off—compulsively—anticipated feelings of loss or even grief, unlike physical hoarding, which might be done as insurance against threats of a more practical kind, like bankruptcy or famine or a zombie apocalypse.
[Many people are] scared to lose remnants of themselves or the digital remains of a loved one… Some of this urge to preserve is curiosity… But the predominant feeling is anxiety.
She quotes Dr. Liz Sillence, “a psychology professor at Northumbria University and one of the few researchers who has examined personal digital data storage”:
The very thought of data can actually make you feel anxious because you know you’re not on top of it. It feels quite overwhelming.
Joan Westenberg, a writer and angel investor, recently wrote: “I Deleted My Second Brain”. A “second brain” is a personal knowledge management practice that consists of capturing as many pieces of valuable content (quotes, ideas, insights) as possible, with the expectation that they will mix and react and bring forth more creative ideas, like harvested crops fermenting into finer products. However, in Westenberg’s experience, the words and thoughts she captured were drained of life, “like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.”
Worse, the architecture began to shape my attention. I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize. Thinking in formats I could file. Every experience became fodder. I stopped wondering and started processing.
She shares fine points about the “mistaken metaphor of the brain” as a dispassionate computer:
Human memory is not an archive. It is associative, embodied, contextual, emotional. We do not think in folders. We do not retrieve meaning through backlinks. Our minds are improvisational. They forget on purpose…
…human intelligence emerged not from static memory storage but from… tools like language, gesture, and writing that allowed us to rehearse, share, and restructure thought… an idea not re-encountered might as well have never been had.
She gets to the irony of the knowledge hoarding habit:
When I first started using [personal knowledge management] tools, I believed I was solving a problem of forgetting. Later, I believed I was solving a problem of integration. Eventually, I realized I had created a new problem: deferral. The more my system grew, the more I deferred the work of thought to some future self who would sort, tag, distill, and extract the gold. That self never arrived.
The root of the problem is perhaps a misplaced sense of value:
…in knowledge work, we hoard. We treat accumulation as a virtue. But what if deletion is the truer discipline?
Among her several conclusions, she resolves that she wants “memory that forgets gracefully”:
I don’t want to manage knowledge. I want to live it.
Most recently, the author and journalist Oliver Burkeman reflected on similar themes in an issue of his newsletter entitled “The power of immediacy”. He wrote about the liberating and creatively inspiring experience of deleting the 300 articles he had saved for reading later, but had not gotten to, along with bookmarks and printouts and task lists and project plans. “The collecting stands in for the doing,” he remarks:
I think the reason we engage in all this hoarding behaviour is that it’s a more comfortable alternative to the uncomfortable intensity of actually living. To take an action is to risk that it might fail, or that it might succeed; that it might lead to big changes, or no changes at all. And it means using up a chunk of your finite time, and maybe also money, instead of just continuing to add to the list of things you potentially could do—which stretches off into the infinite future, where mortality doesn’t apply.
His new approach to counteracting this hoarding urge is to be an “immediatist”:
…these days I’m trying to cultivate a strong bias toward either acting on the sense of inspiration and aliveness when it arises, or letting it go, rather than hoarding it for later. My new scrolling rule is that if I encounter an interesting post, I’ll either read it there and then, making a note of any thoughts it triggers, or I’ll move on.
Of course, I’m a recovering digital hoarder myself. My Dropbox has a messy dump of various backup ZIP files and logs I’ve extracted from the PCs, phones, and online accounts I’ve used over the years: an SQLite database holding the entire SMS history of the iPhone 5s I used in the mid-2010s; a folder of Pidgin chat logs from my Yahoo! Messenger account circa 2010; Simplenote exports and expense tracking app backups and so much more.
These days, I’ve been better at letting go, having consciously decided that the only pieces of personal and private data I’d focus on preserving are a collection of digital journals (in the form of plain text files, which are small, resistant to corruption, and easy to work with) plus the photos and videos in my Google Photos account. It is a manageable, sane amount of data. For online content, Burkeman’s scrolling rule is the goal. His advice to treat one’s to-read pile like a river is also helpful (though he notes that being an ‘immediatist’ is about avoiding creating such a river in the first place).
To-do lists are still quite challenging for me, although I think I’ve made progress on this front as well, with the help of the same insights. I’ve been maintaining and evolving a personal productivity system since I first read David Allen’s Getting Things Done in university, and it took me too long to recognize the stress and anxiety that this self-imposed system has inflicted on me.
All these hoarding habits touch on many themes, but perhaps at the heart of it all is, as Burkeman has been preaching, our discomfort with human finitude. I sometimes think about the work of archivists and journalists and historiographers, their Sisyphean struggle against forgetting, their futile fight against entropy. Of course, there is much meaning in their heroic struggle, but there is an aspect of it, reflected in the analogous personal activity of digital hoarding, that is about imposing control over a nature that is ultimately uncontrollable. We try to not forget, because to forget is to lose something, and to lose something is painful—but in this very aversion, we forget that forgetting is part of being human, and so is feeling grief, and the courage to face the pain of loss.
In the latter part of the Guardian article, an archivist talks about the lack of archiving services for personal (rather than enterprise) purposes, but I think that misses the point. The question of memory, of remembering and forgetting, is not a problem to be solved with the Silicon Valley mindset of technological solutionism, not another aspect of nature to be tamed and mastered and controlled with technology, not because we should not, but because we cannot. We would not have a digital hoarding problem if we did not have digital technology; the solution to the problem will not be through the use of even more technology.
Indeed, we’re better off not thinking of it as a problem at all, because a problem assumes the possibility of control in the hope of finding solutions, and what we face is something beyond control: a fact of life we have to accept and make peace with.
Westenberg has resolved to write down only a handful of things she has to remember. As for the rest, she says, “the important bits will find their way back.” Burkeman similarly acknowledges that he is “simply not going to forget” the truly important stuff. These should not have been news to me, but in my fear of losing control over my memories, and of forgetting where I am directing my efforts towards, I’d forgotten to appreciate the beauty of relying on my instincts, to respect and trust in my innate ability to remember what is worthy of remembering.
My obsession with control and remembering has led to some absurd practices, like putting “Do laundry” on my to-do lists, as if the pile of clothes that periodically materializes on my floor is not enough reminder. But the same urges are at work in more poignant settings. I attended a funeral last week, where there was a large screen set up displaying photos of the deceased. I was told many of the photos were grabbed in a rush from Facebook. I used to think, in my specially bizarre yet rigid way of thinking, that preparing for this sort of thing was critically important, that this was the one moment where the story of a life has to be told well, and completely, comprehensively, and so the curation of the photos to be put on show has to be made with utmost care over many hours and days. Of course, that’s not true. Of course, the people who love and miss the departed will remember a life not through these photos, but through the memories etched into their hearts.
Nothing here is intended to say that we should just throw all conscious efforts of preserving to the wind. It is about finding a balance, swaying back more towards the center, in a scale that encompasses attitudes from being carefree and careless at one end to being intense and controlling at the other. It is about appreciating human nature and abilities in an era obsessed with the power of technology. It is about being more present, without being reckless about the past or the future, and without trying too hard to be present, which would just be another form of attempting control over something uncontrollable—time itself.