My inbox recently reached 1,000 emails. This is unprecedented, as I’ve always cleaned my inbox around the 500-700 email mark. But I let it get out of hand this time.
Cleaning this stuff is no joke. Behind every email, behind every file, is the latent fear that losing access to this one piece of information will cause the IRS to murder you in your sleep, or allow attackers to scam the hell out of you. It feels like the critical difference between life and death, documentation and void, and all of the inane, insane rules of our strange, modern world. Track everything! and other sentiments.
But you have to push past all this if you want to clean house. Many of those emails, such as the ones from Amazon and eBay, are simply “heads-up” messages that you bought something, or that the order shipped. That’s it. As for account statements, well…some people still think the bank is trying to screw you, but the truth is that bank statements are stored electronically and are highly guarded, even from insiders by regulatory guidelines. Besides, when my PayPal account has been sitting at $50 for the past 2 years, I don’t really need account updates every month. Hell, I don’t even need account updates when I make a payment with my credit card, but my bank sends them anyway. Ugh.
But there are those persistent conversations that are very difficult to remove. I had a great deal of communication between me and the operations manager at the Nepalese company I volunteered to build an inventory system for. The company was founded by some guys from the United States, and a series of connections led us together, but for all the years of work I put into that project, it was ultimately a failure that did not have buy-in from the major departments in that small company.
But those emails felt…important. I don’t know if they represented something symbolic to me, if there is still the faint hope that someday the project will spring back to life, but I realized that there would never, ever be a good reason to revisit those emails. Even if that company reached out to me again, it would be a whole new conversation, not, “Oh gee, yeah, you mentioned that 4 years ago in this email”.
So…I deleted them.
And that’s what it takes. Just like with physical crap, you gotta be tough to clean up digital crap.
I did get my emails down to about 400-500, but I’m annoyed even with what I still have. I took these classes several years ago, and…oh, boy. I really need to delete those emails. They probably account for at least 100 of the emails in my inbox.
Find a way to keep tax stuff and medical stuff, of course, but almost everything else is pretty easy to navigate life without.
In others area, though, it turns out that I’ve now used up 10gb of the 15gb allowed me in Google storage. Much of that comes from this past year, with photos from two trips to Nepal and whatnot.
Photos are interesting because there is another latent fear behind every one of them: “I’m going to want this someday, and if it isn’t here when I need it, I am going to be very sad”.
First of all, assess the probabilities. From a loss perspective, there is an order. The most likely scenario that would cause you to lose access to the photos directly stored on your phone is that you either drop your phone in a liquid that causes it to no longer power on, or you lose it, or, slightly less likely, it gets stolen. These are fairly common scenarios. Next likely is a hard drive corruption on your computer, and somewhat unheard of is having a hard drive or flash drive stolen from your house, and least likely is your house burning down.
All of these things can and do happen, but your absolute favorite photos you might be able to store on Facebook or something like that. Or hell, send pics to family who keep them on their hard drives, or something like that. Personally, I’m tired of depending on Google for all of its services. I’m “paying” for it with my data, and that annoys me. If I go past that 15gb mark, I’ll be paying for it in cash, too, I believe. Psychology is also in their favor, as we now so often think, “Gasp! But what if something happens to my phone!” So we turn auto-backup on and the file space fills up. Etc, etc.
Personally, I’m almost tempted to pay for private cloud storage or something like that. The VM that runs this blog might actually be good for that, but I have other thoughts on that, too. I’m also tempted to pay for a more private email, I just haven’t resolved to do that yet.
But also, I would probably never care if 99% of these photos went missing. Which is kind of the kicker for me. Yes, it is great to be able to revisit things you’ve done in life, or events you’ve shared with people. (Speaking of, I realize I don’t actually have many pictures with my friends, but then you really only need a few, in my opinion). But at the end of the day, most of these pics simply don’t matter, and your life would move on just fine without them, which is true of most emails, files, and other clutter, too.
PS: I’ve actually considered condensing the 200+ posts on this blog into 10 or so polished essays. This would be really cool, but I suspect people would be even less likely to read them, lol. At the same time, though, I love having a public platform to write on; it’s cathartic in many ways. But I do have my days when I wish I would just shut up.