Everything is Temporary, Except My Downloads

Searching for simplicity in my relationship with technology

Some of the digital clutter Catherine Economopoulos has had to grapple with

Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, I found myself having lived in three different countries, with nearly a dozen different mailing addresses in just a few short years. The bulk of my belongings, though, remained in my parents’ home, tucked away in a suburban town. I only kept the necessities with me—living out of suitcases, backpacks, duffel bags, and totes—sharing clothes with friends when I found myself unprepared for bad weather or special events. When I made it home for the holidays or in the summers, I’d declutter a bit at a time, feeling emotionally detached from the things there, and focused on swapping out seasonal clothes to suit the next leg of my travels. I certainly felt unattached, and when I looked around, my environment reflected that approach, so I called myself a minimalist throughout my travels.

When I went off to Canada looking for work, I reasoned that I could survive the Toronto winter with only one pair of shoes (my signature sky-high platform boots, of course), and one all-purpose coat for any and all occasions. I lived in black, each shirt matching with each pant, and a season’s worth of clothes all fitting in a slim carry-on, agnostic to the breadth of situations that awaited me. Yet if asked about the thousands of voice memos cluttering my iPhone’s storage space, I was entirely unwilling to part with even one.

I left for Greece, where I briefly lived to support an aging relative, with a single modest suitcase and my threadbare backpack, despite the months I knew I’d spend exploring, cleaning, learning, playing, working. Fortunately, I also had over 10 gigabytes of saved text messages amassed over a decade to keep me company. Did I ever go back and read through those conversations from another life? Certainly not. On some level, I knew I never would. But the compulsion to gather and store fragments of days long gone remained strong—far stronger than my need for physical possessions—and I found myself unable to press delete.

This era of transience ushered me toward a minimalist facade that was truly ignorant of the mountains of stuff I had amassed over the years: my digital “belongings.” In those days, I also couch-surfed often. In the homes of gracious friends, semi-estranged aunties, and sordid summer flings, I saw ways of living all across the spectrum. There were messy sentimentalists with trinkets strewn all over, tidy young professionals in sterile little spaces, and every sense of style in between. Sometimes the bulk of their belongings were tucked away in closets, sometimes it was more akin to an organized chaos. Sometimes I even felt that the few contents of my bag might be a disturbance to their stuff-less existence. In the case of one woman who seemed so neat and tidy, I was afraid to unpack a single item, lest I bring a sense of lived-in-ness to the seemingly sacred minimalism of her apartment.

But for every single living space I became privy to, I saw another side too, one that seemed consistent no matter the aesthetic, no matter the tax bracket, no matter the material sensibilities of the person it belonged to. The universe contained in electronic devices was always expansive and rich. The tidy woman lived on her laptop: a compact MacBook that, upon startup, revealed a veritable circus of shortcuts, documents, photographs, notes-to-self all contained within her cluttered desktop. Those neat, self-proclaimed minimalists scrolled through endless camera rolls to show off hundreds upon hundreds of images snapped in Prague or the backyard.

Good friends of mine all bonded over the wealth of nonsensical old entries in their notes apps, going back years. Gigabytes of data stacked up, in documents, downloads, and drives. I had my hair cut by a woman who told me she hangs no art on her apartment walls because she likes her space to feel “clean.” She receives a message and below the dozen notifications that have piled up, the most extravagantly-colored illustration springs to life on her screen’s background. I imagine she has dozens that change out like a slideshow, one after the other to decorate the space where she spends most of her time.

Unlike clothes, books, or furniture, data is forever. It can be preserved; it’s seemingly eternal, yet far more malleable. I considered myself neither a hoarder nor a minimalist—always sporting a healthy fear of the spatial commitment that having a lot of stuff seemed to impose, while still appreciating gadgets and mementos too much to eliminate them from my life.

In the digital realm, though, I’m certainly a collector in every sense of the word. And in recent years, I’ve learned that you probably are too. My laptop is a treasure trove of all the musings and memories that I’ve accrued from work, school, and play. I have meticulously organized my Google Drive into color-coded categories, considering the “stuff” there to be far more integral to my personality and life than most of my real, physical belongings. And from glimpses into the digital lives of others, I’m pretty sure we’re all headed deeper into a future that looks just like this.

Gone are the days of limits on your virtual “stuff.” Instead of flipping through a fifty-page phone book and replacing old entries on the finite pages with recent ones, I press plus and my infinite Rolodex gets a plus-one. The number of contacts in my phone for people whose names I can’t even place is nearly in the triple digits. It’s easy to keep those numbers “just in case” when my capacity for them seems unending. Even the most minimalistic personalities in my life have inched toward an expanded idea of what makes “stuff” essential; we don’t feel the weight of our things like we did when they filled bins and boxes. I found myself wondering, when every photograph is digitized, every document scanned, and every last letter archived, can any of us really consider ourselves minimalists?

As I emerged from the phase of wayfaring and sought to settle down with a long-term job and a single place of residence, I reconsidered the evidence of the life I had lived. I could certainly keep dozens of virtual tickets and pop-ups nestled in my Apple Wallet. I could keep my email registered to hundreds of mailing lists and loyalty cards, keep the messages exchanged with exes, professors, and pen pals from eons ago. I could even keep the hundreds of meticulously crafted playlists that I had accrued over years and years. Unlike ticket stubs, boxes of letters, and eight-track mixtapes, though, it was almost out of sight, out of mind.

I had already filled my life to the brim with invisible clutter. I couldn’t stick these virtual train stubs in a scrapbook. Which trip were they from, anyway? I feared losing access to my highly-curated Spotify account, yet at any given time I was only listening to the three or four most recent playlists I’d made, and there were dozens I’d likely never play again.

My mess was tucked away in my pocket, but it was there, always; it had unbelievable power over me and my life. As I approached a new era of living, I grappled with why I couldn’t bear to part with digital artifacts when it had been so easy for me to go on without my physical ones. That old question about what I’d grab when running out of a burning building had lost its edge.

So, one by one, I reevaluated my needs. I wanted to get to the bottom of what served me rather than indiscriminately acquiring more and more e-clutter with each passing day. I feared that at the rate I’d accelerated to, I’d have terabytes of digital possessions by the time I hit thirty. It started with purging text chains that were nearly a decade long. One with my childhood best friend was over seven gigabytes on its own, and we were still of the generation that didn’t have access to cell phones until our teen years. Nostalgia sinks its teeth in deeply, though, and I couldn’t bring myself to delete the documents and notes we’d shared on late-night sleepovers in our hometown.

The act of culling in the virtual world was antithetical to the ritualistic feeling of clearing out my physical space. Back in my childhood home, I had a yearly practice of cleaning out my closet—selling dresses if they had the tags on, donating gently-used coats to the local church, feeling lighter knowing I’d given new life to that which weighed me down.

This culling was entirely different. My virtual clutter had value to me, and me alone. In this arena, deletion was a singular moment, the click of a button which quite literally erased any given item’s existence. There was no second life to be had. The community center always hosted clothing swaps, book swaps, mug swaps, but no data swaps! No one wanted my stuff, so I had to make the choice to either continue accruing it or just let it vanish. I pressed delete, and was left feeling ambiguous, if a little lighter. A little less tethered to my devices. A little more free.

Now, the next great hurdle of my digital collections will be my archive of voice memos. I remember recording my grandmother telling stories of her village before she passed, but in going back to listen, all I’ve found is notes to self, grocery lists, and recordings of concerts that I can’t even place.

The real problem is how few of the documents have been labelled with titles or notes. With almost 40 hours (22 gigabytes!) of recordings to sort through, I’m taking on that project one piece of media at a time, maintaining the minimalist mentality as much as I can. It’s become so easy to CTRL+S everything, yet my cyber archives grow faster than ever. I suppose taping fragments of my daily life has always seemed like a perfect way to capture whatever’s important at that moment in time. I’ve begun to see clearly how that endless capacity for storage had me carried away; doesn’t every good moment of life feel important? When those mementos can be made constantly (in recordings, photographs, or otherwise), then they blur together, none of them retaining their importance.

The events of life unfold to be lived, not memorialized. So, as I move forward into a world where the capacity for e-clutter is rapidly expanding, I’ve started to think twice before holding onto so many digital souvenirs. I’d rather live life once, through my eyes, than a million times played back on screens.

Catherine Economopoulos is a multidisciplinary creative from Greece, who can usually be found in Athens, Chicago, or Toronto. On hiatus from the wonderful world of academia, she spends her time working, writing, reading, making, conversing. More work can be found at economopoulos.net.