Not quite sure what to make of that yet.
I have long been interested in the tenets of minimalism, and I frequently feel confused and distressed by an apparent owning of too many things. I don’t own many things, but clutter in my home or virtual space always seems to make me feel inadequate, like I should be more in control of the possessions and experiences that I let enter my life, and those that I choose to let stay.
It could be that the presence of mess allows for too many possible courses of action. There are a dozen things you can do with a box sitting in the corner, even though it should be thrown away. A snack sitting on your desk engenders the possibility of eating at any time, which brings up questions of nutrition, of when and how much. One thought process seems to lead to another, endlessly. The idea of an immaculate space is appealing in the lack of possibility it presents, of the “needing to understand” that it offers to the brain.
Worse than organizing is deciding whether or not to throw something away. Some things are easy; cans in strange and inappropriate places, plastic or paper wrappers meant to be disposable. Then there are objects of minimal or indeterminate use: paper clips you’ve kept to press open a small button; pocket knives that are slightly worse than other pocket knives; greeting cards, sentimental or not; books you might read; trinkets with uniqueness but not utility. Is it worth orphaning or destroying these objects to clear your mind? How long does something stay good for? These are the problems, I imagine, that minimalists grapple with.
I don’t own a hopechest, but I have something close. In my closet, in an old drawstring backpack and a reusable Trader Joe’s bag, is a small collection of the things that are the most important to me. They include three jars of sand taken from different beaches in Hawaii, a flier for a snorkel shop, a program for a play, a hiking guidebook of a national park—all things related to people or experiences that I love. A book of self-published poems from someone I looked up to. Pictures from a backpacking trip taken on a disposable camera. A brochure from a hotel in Berlin. Cards from old students and jobs, and dozens of journals. All these objects are linked to the things I want to remember. And over the years I’ve thinned this collection, discarding the objects whose memories didn’t endure. This has been a freeing, natural process. There’s only one thing that I’ve ever regretted throwing away, which was my senior year highschool yearbook—a valuable artifact from a very transformational time.
As the times change, we are moving away from physical objects as the things we use to recall powerful emotion. With cloud storage, particularly, the tokens we keep of our favorite experiences can grow boundlessly in number because they have taken on digital form. Physical photo albums, or backpacks full of letters and cards, are becoming obsolete. Digital albums, instead of being stored in your closet or hopechest, are uploaded by private companies in countless pieces to dark and scattered servers. Arguably these memories are safer for it, but the things that remind us of the past lose their uniqueness as their physical identity disintegrates, as they are broken into bits and reconstituted on demand.
Lots of the things I’ve kept, and especially the things I’ve seen my parents keep, are very old, and seem to gain value as they get older, as if their importance were related to their fragility. Maybe the simple existence of a pressed flower is miraculous in its own right. An interesting middle ground, which in the future might even come to occupy the awkward teenage niche of Betamax or floppy disk technologies, is the physical hard disk drive, where data is stored digitally but ultimately seems to rely upon the physical integrity of the container. These seem me like enormous photo albums, the last instance of closed digital repositories before data could be parceled out and stored on the internet. Recently, I had a hard drive fail with a decade of photos inside, and it hurt. I want those files back, and the only chance left is likely data recovery. Like photo albums that survived a fire or flood, the only hope of putting things together again lies in the forensics of physical reconstruction.
Compared to different methods of storage, the processes of digital purging and minimalist downsizing mirror each nicely. Each is about determining the worth of an object, or multiple objects, or a collection. Once that’s ascertained, we either jettison something or elect to keep it on board. Where the two differ is in the amount of space that each object, each particle, takes up. The Library of Congress can only hold so many millions of newspapers or miles of microprint, and all of this is eventually set to decay. Digital packets of information, though, are infinitely small to us, and becoming smaller. Cloud storage offers up a space vaster than our imagination, with the possibility of endless backup and replication. It’s more than we know what to do with, a universe expanding faster than the speed of light.
What exactly does this infinite space allow us to do, as humans—as creatures with finite brains, susceptible to panic and overwhelm, who are frequently found on the losing side of comparisons between organic matter and AI? We now constantly carry, in a 3×6″ light-emitting box, a photo album that endlessly expands when opened, like a fractal. There is no functional limit to the amount of information we can trail behind us in the wake of our lives. It is a bottomless bag of memorabilia. The limiting nature of physical space, which once dictated “take only what you need” to us as homeowners and hunter-gatherers, is spurned by technology. There is more to get lost in, to reminisce about, to identify with, than can possibly be healthy. That is, without minimizing—a process which is getting harder and harder as the sheer amount of things increases, and which might ultimately become completely useless.
On the heels of the hard drive dying, I upgraded my phone. I had expected another “cutting ties” moment, was ready to say goodbye to the pictures, apps, and conversations I’d accumulated over the course of the past five years. Instead, the process of transferring all the data over to my new phone was shockingly easy. With minimal interference on my part, a single app extracted everything from the old phone, stored it in an intermediary on the cloud, and downloaded it all back onto the new one. Honestly, it was too much. I had wanted a fresh start. So over the course of the next several hours I painstakingly and manually culled all of the transferred data that I didn’t need. Scrolling, deleting one thing at a time, missing none of it, I lightened the load. Prepared to accept the guilt that comes from willfully forgetting? Yes, I’m sure. The worst guilt, though not the most deliberation, came from deleting the old contact info of people I’d met five, ten, or fifteen years ago and didn’t need to know anymore. First name, last name—by removing their info from my phone, I erased their memories from my life.
I felt a little remorseful, but it’s useful to cut ourselves some slack. Our brains aren’t binary in the same way that computers are, and we store information differently. Our memories are shades of gray; muddy, vague, and tied together by cobwebs. This is why we keep things around as reminders in the first place. I’m sure I will remember the awful people who left marginal imprints on my life again, eventually, when an adjacent neuron fires. The natural process of forgetting had already begun. I don’t need their phone numbers anymore.
The trouble with jettisoning digital memories is that they take up no space. Your phone won’t be overrun by vestigial contact information—not in the same way that your brain can hang up on negative triggers or be overfilled with stimulation. The phone simply stores it away, out of sight, in perpetuity. The closet will never be full. It takes an act of deliberate human excision to seek out these data and erase them. You simply decide that you don’t want to think about it anymore. For as long as you live. You don’t want to remember an ex, for example, or parts of them—don’t want to think about (the entirety of) the particular, distinct period of time you spent together. Delete. Even if it was a duplicate picture, or one moment out of a thousand similar ones, is each instance not unique in some way? Have you thought this through?
First name, last name. Here was someone who told me she drank coffee all day long, on the bus; too much. Gone. First name, last: here is a girl who was impressed and taken aback when I sight-read her sheet music from The Phantom of the Opera and sang. Gone. People I hated. People I barely remember remembering. Gone. The vast majority were bystanders, fragments and shades—Matts and Michaels whose absence will make my life a little easier the next time I dial up someone in my current batch of Matthews and Mikes. Call it defragmenting.
Always there is the desire to own less stuff, to move faster and more efficiently towards personal goals with less distraction. Clearing one’s immediate environment helps to some extent, but there’s an ulterior motive. Digital objects exist in infinitesimal space, yet the emotions they trigger are heavy. No one is the same person they were ten years ago; not in the same way a file from ten years ago is the same. What you’ve saved reminds you of the person you once were, not about a past portion of your unchanged life. And when the useless files are culled it’s usually not to free up resources, but to avoid the weight of the past. To forget about painful times. To disavow a previous version of yourself. To create the same sort of self-protective, absentminded lacuna that smart technology offers us on a daily basis. The pain-avoidant behavior that governs so much of our unconscious life puts on a nice pair of shoes, stands up straight, and claims nobler ends. What we choose to save, we select for the sake of building a coherent, fabricated persona—one that we can live with every day. But we lie about it, and call it minimalism. After all, who could possibly form meaningful new relationships with seventy obsolete contacts on their smartphone? With pictures of shopping lists in their storage? With screenshots of their homescreen or pictures of their pockets taking up an instant of their attention? With something small existing alongside you, a barnacle, that inconvenienced you, troubled you, or recalled heartbreak?
The process of minimizing is determining if a thing is worthy or not worthy of being remembered. In the traditional sense, this meant deciding if something was worth keeping in your possession and in your tow. Digital minimizing, on the other hand, is totally impractical, a means of cleansing your emotions. But it’s still essential. Though it’s normal, even prudent, to feel some guilt over curating the past, we have to structure this new digital space the same way that we structure our brains. Our recall and storage is not infinite.
Who are we to find love anew when we carry all the markings of love and trauma from our past? We must forget some things and remember the rest. Save the best things, and let the others go with no guilt. Because without the new option to save your experiences permanently, flawlessly, and in a neverending series of infallible clones, they would have eventually disappeared, anyway.
is an awesome, awesome book. Before I go any further, it’s worth noting that this influential person is Christian—very, very Christian, which is something I definitely am not, and which was probably a sticking point in our relationship. Which is fine. Although I disagree with religion—or maybe I just can’t wrap my head around it—there are certain tenets and principles that I think are absolutely effective and objective in terms of the achievement of one’s individual dreams. Prayer: the envisioning of a desired outcome; mentally placing yourself in the situation so as to strengthen your ability to make it real. Practicing gratitude and love; love thy neighbor. What’s not to be gained by this practice? Most importantly, the principle of faith: the ability to dream of a perfect, delicious, completely amazing life that exceeds your wildest expectations. One that is simply tailored to you, where every last wish and desire of your innermost soul is fulfilled. I have struggled with this. If you look at my writing, you will see that my faith comes and goes, capriciously, as I fall in and out of cycles of depression. (Perhaps this is why I fall into those cycles of depression.) Although religion irks me in a lot of ways, and there are things I disagree with or don’t understand—the concept of an afterlife, the acceptance of something as truth based on feeling and the way you have been in the past instead of ways you might be in the future; the lack of broadening of horizons—faith is a concept that is actually central and indispensable in my own life. To me, it is the belief in the self. Rather than the jargon and terminology of Jesus, or God, or “The Universe”—all, to me, religious terms—I believe in the power of the self to actualize and execute that life that delivers on every level imaginable. My influential person’s belief was astounding; it had brought her to a new state to live, to impressive levels of fierce badassery, and to the fruition (and continuous fruition-ing) of her dreams. It brought her path into contact with mine, and this happened to be exactly what I needed.
jejunejesuit 