I used to obsessively weed out pictures from the week every Sunday to create a perfectly curated collection in my phone (usually photos I felt I looked good in). Funnily enough, I’ve come to appreciate the ugliest and most random photos and videos from my teenage years that slipped through the cracks the most. Videos in which I can hear what my friends’ voices sounded like or what my smile looked like with braces on, which I always avoided showing in pictures.
Not sure if this resonates at all with the piece at all, but it’s funny how little Christmas card-type pictures evoke in me compared to the silly videos I took.
I feel that. that's another reason why I'm so averse to deleting things bc I'm like "maybe this random odd thought will actually feel really meaningful to me someday?" but then I end up taking it too far and wanting to capture everything
A huge aspect of making your stored media feel meaningful is to make it physical. I almost never look at my phone gallery but after grad school my friends and I made a physical photo album out of our best pics and I look at that all the time.
Eh, I'm not really buying it. I have a lot of memories I'd love to revisit, but the photographs are lost, and often seeing old photos puts them in a very different context. Some significant changes in my life have been started by accidentally finding a 10+ year old journal and realizing I've been going in circles all this time.
I started treating my ADHD, in fact I diagnosed it in the first place, which I never really bothered to as I was high functioning and thought it's something that other people have. It was a gigantic improvement in my quality of life.
It took comparing the journals where I try to outthink my executive dysfunction over a decade ago, to trying to outthink my executive dysfunction now, and realizing I've made basically no progress and the problem is not something I can deal with by just being more organized.
Beautiful. I recently have been revisiting old journal entries which is slightly counter intuitive as the whole premise of journaling was to let go. But your essay reminded me the importance of letting go despite the abundance of storage and access to the past!
Like many, I'm a hoarder - interestingly, though I'm a pre-digital hoarder (books, newspaper clippings, journals, prints...). Every once in a while, I get into this urge to rummage & throw away some of this 'junk'.
I've been more disciplined with my digital artefacts to keep them manageable within the 'free' limits.
I've learnt to ask the 'why' question more often to help me choose between 'keep' & 'trash'. A place for everything (i choose to keep) & everything in its place.
super interesting- i absolutely do the same and have struggled for so long to make sense of this habit that I find important. I do enjoy going through my old notebooks and looking at what I’ve written down, and writing those things down likewise helps me moment-of — whether that be organizationally or just as a bit of reassurance that i’m in control of my day, ideas, and tasks. maybe it has something to do with making the intangible tangible and collectible, present in some distant background. maybe it’s about not wanting to forget, like you’ve written, wanting to remember and “have” everything kept, maybe it’s about possession. this piece brings up a lot of important questions for me!!
totally – I think there are many motivations underlying it and there's much to gain from writing things down. I find the journaling I enjoy most these days is when I'm writing from a place of true relaxation and acceptance and just exploring what comes up, which was pretty rare in my journaling before. glad it sparked some thoughts!
I switched to a dumb phone a year ago and was compelled to buy a small point-and-shoot camera to document (read: remember everything) my new life.
The point and shoot camera ended up being *just* inconvenient enough for me to stop taking pictures altogether; pulling the SD card out just to spend 5 minutes uploading photos to Google photos, having to remember to recharge the battery, taking 20 seconds to turn on the camera and snap a pic before the moment was gone.
For a few weeks I felt like I was doing something wrong when I didn't even have a camera to let it eat first at meals. Then I began to question my motives about why I wanted to document things. I realized that most of us take pics to not forget, rather than to remember. Because we usually remember the things that matter to us, unaided. If we needed photos to remember something, is that thing worth remembering in the first place? And so what if, in a given moment, we can't remember something, for example, all the times we saw a friend? What is so bad about recalling portions of the thing that we *can* remember in that moment, and then having the other portions fall out of our subconscious while we're in the shower later that day?
It's funny because I was just writing a post about immortality and I have other posts already on the subject. To expand on your point it's not just about specificity I also think it's about quality, choices, and acceptance. To build a life to ensure quality experiences and makes choices that allow for that. But also to accept that we are impermanent and make peace with it.
I used to obsessively weed out pictures from the week every Sunday to create a perfectly curated collection in my phone (usually photos I felt I looked good in). Funnily enough, I’ve come to appreciate the ugliest and most random photos and videos from my teenage years that slipped through the cracks the most. Videos in which I can hear what my friends’ voices sounded like or what my smile looked like with braces on, which I always avoided showing in pictures.
Not sure if this resonates at all with the piece at all, but it’s funny how little Christmas card-type pictures evoke in me compared to the silly videos I took.
I feel that. that's another reason why I'm so averse to deleting things bc I'm like "maybe this random odd thought will actually feel really meaningful to me someday?" but then I end up taking it too far and wanting to capture everything
I don’t think it’s finiteness that gives life meaning. I think it’s choices » shocked that i haven't heard this framing before?!
A huge aspect of making your stored media feel meaningful is to make it physical. I almost never look at my phone gallery but after grad school my friends and I made a physical photo album out of our best pics and I look at that all the time.
Eh, I'm not really buying it. I have a lot of memories I'd love to revisit, but the photographs are lost, and often seeing old photos puts them in a very different context. Some significant changes in my life have been started by accidentally finding a 10+ year old journal and realizing I've been going in circles all this time.
example of a change?
I started treating my ADHD, in fact I diagnosed it in the first place, which I never really bothered to as I was high functioning and thought it's something that other people have. It was a gigantic improvement in my quality of life.
It took comparing the journals where I try to outthink my executive dysfunction over a decade ago, to trying to outthink my executive dysfunction now, and realizing I've made basically no progress and the problem is not something I can deal with by just being more organized.
Beautiful. I recently have been revisiting old journal entries which is slightly counter intuitive as the whole premise of journaling was to let go. But your essay reminded me the importance of letting go despite the abundance of storage and access to the past!
part of remembering is forgetting!
dang now that you mention it there was another banger blog post on this topic I saw recently https://corny.substack.com/p/organic-web
LOL interesting title right
Like many, I'm a hoarder - interestingly, though I'm a pre-digital hoarder (books, newspaper clippings, journals, prints...). Every once in a while, I get into this urge to rummage & throw away some of this 'junk'.
I've been more disciplined with my digital artefacts to keep them manageable within the 'free' limits.
I've learnt to ask the 'why' question more often to help me choose between 'keep' & 'trash'. A place for everything (i choose to keep) & everything in its place.
super interesting- i absolutely do the same and have struggled for so long to make sense of this habit that I find important. I do enjoy going through my old notebooks and looking at what I’ve written down, and writing those things down likewise helps me moment-of — whether that be organizationally or just as a bit of reassurance that i’m in control of my day, ideas, and tasks. maybe it has something to do with making the intangible tangible and collectible, present in some distant background. maybe it’s about not wanting to forget, like you’ve written, wanting to remember and “have” everything kept, maybe it’s about possession. this piece brings up a lot of important questions for me!!
totally – I think there are many motivations underlying it and there's much to gain from writing things down. I find the journaling I enjoy most these days is when I'm writing from a place of true relaxation and acceptance and just exploring what comes up, which was pretty rare in my journaling before. glad it sparked some thoughts!
I switched to a dumb phone a year ago and was compelled to buy a small point-and-shoot camera to document (read: remember everything) my new life.
The point and shoot camera ended up being *just* inconvenient enough for me to stop taking pictures altogether; pulling the SD card out just to spend 5 minutes uploading photos to Google photos, having to remember to recharge the battery, taking 20 seconds to turn on the camera and snap a pic before the moment was gone.
For a few weeks I felt like I was doing something wrong when I didn't even have a camera to let it eat first at meals. Then I began to question my motives about why I wanted to document things. I realized that most of us take pics to not forget, rather than to remember. Because we usually remember the things that matter to us, unaided. If we needed photos to remember something, is that thing worth remembering in the first place? And so what if, in a given moment, we can't remember something, for example, all the times we saw a friend? What is so bad about recalling portions of the thing that we *can* remember in that moment, and then having the other portions fall out of our subconscious while we're in the shower later that day?
Thanks for the thought-provoking piece, Kasra!
It's funny because I was just writing a post about immortality and I have other posts already on the subject. To expand on your point it's not just about specificity I also think it's about quality, choices, and acceptance. To build a life to ensure quality experiences and makes choices that allow for that. But also to accept that we are impermanent and make peace with it.