I have a confession to make: I’m a hoarder. Not a hoarder of material possessions – oh no, my house is almost entirely free of unnecessary stuff. I take pride in actively reducing the amount of physical crap that I own, and donate items I no longer need. My family and I have even made a gift-giving agreement among ourselves where any gifts must either be consumable (specialty foods, restaurant gift cards, etc) or experiences (tickets to a show, subscription to a service, etc).
My hoarding, on the other hand, is of the digital variety. My “collection” only spans a few external hard drives of 1 TB each, occasionally backed up or synced to a duplicate set of external hard drives. The physical space occupied by these drives is less than one cubic foot, but the vastness of the digital stuff that they contain is… considerable. Just to give you a rough idea of what I’m dealing with:
- Archives of old emails and correspondence from previous jobs and contracts.
- Archives of Instant Messenger conversations with old friends and ex-girlfriends, dating back to 1997.
- A collection of viruses and trojans for MS-DOS from the 80s and 90s, originally for research purposes.
- A huge library of shareware games and programs from the MS-DOS era.
- An archive of articles, papers, and textbooks (in PDF form) relating to computer science, mathematics, and physics.
- An archive of high-resolution NASA imagery of planets, nebulas, and galaxies.
- An extensive library of file formats (i.e. sample files saved by all kinds of different software) and documentation for every file format specification.
- Emulators and system images of virtually every computer system and game console ever built.
- My complete genome, which I’ve had sequenced a few years ago.
- And of course, my personal photo and video library, from my birth to the present day, and also photos from my parents’ and grandparents’ old albums that I have digitized and saved.
So yeah… recently I’ve been asking myself whether digital hoarding is a problem of the same magnitude as physical hoarding. On the surface, one might ask “What’s the problem?” These things aren’t taking up any physical space, and you don’t have to give them another thought after you save them to the disk. And yet, perhaps there is an emotional toll that comes with the mere knowledge that all of this old data still exists, and remains your responsibility. If anything, this is surely at odds with my attitude towards physical possessions, which is quite minimalist.
A basic litmus test for hoarding behavior consists of a simple question: How would you feel about throwing away any random item that you see around you? Will you use this twisty-tie for anything? How about this pen cap? Do you really need three different cheese graters? How about this pile of old magazines? A hoarder will answer these questions with something like, “You never know when it will come in handy.” And if I’m being honest, that’s exactly how I feel about all the digital items I listed above. I feel the same hesitation about deleting any of them as a “physical” hoarder might feel about donating old clothes, or throwing away expired spices from the pantry.
When I look at my enormous pile of digital junk, I see in myself all the symptoms of real hoarding, albeit confined to the digital realm, which is likely why it’s been able to go on for so long. I’m also reminded of how freeing and cathartic it feels to let go of unnecessary possessions, and I theorize that a similar feeling of freedom will result from permanently letting go of digital baggage.
Therefore, I have resolved to stop being hypocritical in this regard, and start practicing digitally what I practice physically. Many of the items I mentioned in my list are actually replaceable (easily found on the web, or generated with minimal effort). Some of the items are technically “irreplaceable,” such as my old emails and IM archives, but represent unnecessary cognitive and emotional baggage, and have no real nostalgic value. The only things that seem to have actual meaning, and are objectively worth keeping, are my personal photos and videos, and even those can probably be trimmed down a bit.
It’s time to let the past go, and embrace the future without anything weighing you down. Let the cleaning begin.