How many email accounts do you have? I used to have three—a very old one I started in the early days of email, a company account, and another personal email, just in case.
Before our digital devices were made for larger capacity, our emails were the places where we stored many parts of our lives. Photos, message threads, files—many of them bookmarked and never revisited—packed our accounts.
Change jobs or get hacked and you know the hassle of figuring out what to download and save, if anything. When my father died a few years ago, our email threads were the only ones I saved offline before deleting my one account entirely.
I had not looked at the rest, just let it go into oblivion.
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That year I also started the closets and storage clean-up—physical and digital. Because I was only going to scatter my life so far, I had to draw a line. I thought again about the issue when I came across Ezra Klein’s New York Times column.
Klein calls all we keep for ages our ‘shame digital closet.’ Once Google gave us 1 GB of storage, we got lazy and started keeping everything.
“Our digital lives have become one shame closet after another (…) my digital life is a series of monuments to the cost of combining maximal storage with minimal intention. I have thousands of photos of my children, but few that I’ve set aside to revisit. I have records of virtually every text I’ve sent since I was in college, but no idea how to find the ones that meant something. I spent years blasting my thoughts to millions of people on X and Facebook even as I fell behind on correspondence with dear friends. I have stored everything and saved nothing.”
I was lucky dad reminded me of the value of memories and personal exchanges. When I got back from his funeral, I went through my digital photos over the last few years to include the best in physical albums for me and my sisters.
Since we still have bodies, most of the things we do that give us pleasure are in the physical world.
After each trip, I print the best travel photos. Past Christmas, I print the photos we share among family members in different continents to send with physical cards to family throughout the year.
I still handwrite short letters with quotes and cards to family and friends. They love it—I do, too. Letter writing is a lost art.
Writing a letter is giving a gift of more. It implies a reciprocity that creates a two-way relationship with our experience and that of the person for whom we write. Addressee and writer connect in the tangible act through the power of the handwritten word and the container in which it comes—the letter, or card.
We still collect, read and preserve the letters of people from 100 years ago. Famous or not, known or not, many letters are interesting pieces of writing. They move us, and in doing so, remind us of our humanity. Reiner Maria Rilke was my favorite letter-writer.
Some people keep physical cards for a few years. There’s a magical pull to the written word. Digital correspondence may be efficient and fast, but it’s also quickly overwhelmed in the inbox and streams and forgotten.
I keep folders for family, but rarely re-read. Do you file and refer back to stuff?
During the pandemic I sent too many photos to family and friends and my email account got large. I went through it last year to slim it down considerably. I started including consolidation of digital stuff to my monthly routine.
I find empty space helps me think better.
I review, sort, eliminate every month, because I know that once you let things get out of hand, it becomes daunting. My sister’s death was proof that a bigger apartment means you store more things (she likely would have preferred to live, with less.)
“There is so much I would delight in rediscovering. But I can’t find what matters in the morass (...) What began with our files soon came for our friends and family. The social networks made it easy for anyone we’ve ever met, and plenty of people we never met, to friend and follow us. (…) The idea that we could have so much community with so little effort was an illusion. We are digitally connected to more people than ever and terribly lonely nevertheless. Closeness requires time, and time has not fallen in cost nor risen in quantity.”
Ezra Klein
The ease with which we can get more space—American homes have become huge, while families have shrunk—and add things and people (in social media)—the more we put aside. ‘For a rainy day,’ we tell ourselves.
But that day, when it comes, shows us that it was all for nought. We may have hundreds of connections and thousands of followers—yet still count the real friends on the fingers of one hand. ‘Pochi, ma buoni,’ we say in Italian (few, but good.)
Have more, want more.
There is something to be said for a hand-written note—it’s personal, it’s intimate, it communicates much more than just a desire to stay in touch. It touches us back. And maybe, just maybe dedicating the time to write a letter helps us change the conceptual metaphor of time itself.
What would happen if we reframed both—the inbox as ‘all you can eat’ repository and time as something fuller and more human than just ‘money’?
We can refer to our analog culture and learn more about how different cultures understand time.
References:
‘Happy 20th Anniversary, Gmail. I’m Sorry I’m Leaving You.’ Ezra Klein, The New York Times (April 2024)
‘How Different Cultures Understand Time,’ Richard Lewis, Culturally Modified (Oct, 2018)