On Memory and the Weight of Digital Clutter

Not long ago, my laptop broke. It was from my previous workplace. Old, dented here and there, pushed hard enough for years. Long nights, urgent deadlines, presentations edited minutes before meetings. I took it to two different repair shops, but with no luck. It's unfixable. Inside it were years of work, photos my wife and I had taken, moments we thought we'd keep forever. Now, they're likely gone for good. Oddly, I didn't feel angry. Just... still.

Realizing something in that moment pulled me back to the '80s, a time when memory was fleeting, and deeply human. There were no digital backups, no cloud storage. No instagram to scroll through, no Google Photos. Yet people still remembered. Somehow, we held on, not in megabytes, but in moments.

A photo by Mick Haupt

Taking a picture of a family reunion back then was deliberate. Film was not cheap. Every shot had weight. You didn't take ten photos of the same scene. You took one, hoped for the best, and waited days or weeks just to see the result. Then, sometimes it got overexposed or "burned". The image was blurry. But it didn't matter. Because the memories do not live on screens. They lived in us. Only in our minds. Photos might capture faces, but never the true feeling. It might record the road, but rarely the real journey.

Today, we hoard pixels.

We tend to archive everything. Birthdays, first steps, weddings, graduations, even funerals. Nothing escapes the lens. Every moment is captured, saved, uploaded, as if fearing the act of forgetting is worse than living without presence. We have become digital hoarders, clinging to bits like they're lifelines. We are too busy to make evidence of a happy life, obsessively. 

Just maybe... We need to resist that urge. To go for a morning walk without taking a picture of the sunrise. To eat without snap the plate. To sit with friends and colleagues, leave the phone, and laugh profoundly. To let the moment breathe, fragile, and fade away. To return to presence. Stay in it. To the art of noticing, not recording. Maybe, just maybe, letting go or forgetting is part of what makes memory meaningful. We should realize that from the very beginning, we lose something that we don't own.

Sometimes all I want is to head west on 20 in a car I can't afford, with a plan I don't have, just me, my music, and the road

- Deborah, Baby Driver