Digital Hoarding

   I can remember when all the information I ever needed to save was kept in a single-drawer filing cabinet plus maybe a half dozen binders on the shelf. This repository contained all the so-called “important” paperwork related to living life: Bank statements, investment records, insurance policies, tax information, medical details, car titles, owner’s manuals for various tools and appliances, receipts, etc. I could remember exactly what I'd filed away because I had at one time or another held it in my hand, and I knew right where everything was if I needed to fetch it.
 
   Then computers came along and wrecked everything.

   Computers make it way too tempting to save everything. This makes it harder to remember what you have, as well as harder to retrieve it if you do remember. I guess this tendency to hoard is, in part, because digital information doesn’t consume too much real estate. A jump drive could could contain the Encyclopædia Britannica or nothing at all, and there’s no way to tell by looking at it or by weighing it. Physical paper doesn’t work that way.
 
   Physical paper made it much easier to spot information hoarders in the days before computers (“BC” …?). These were the people with mountains of papers and books and random notes lying around all over the place. Disheveled professor stereotypes aside, these folks weren’t better or worse than anyone else, nor were they smarter or dumber. They just wanted to know stuff and had a tough time letting go of the written and/or printed word – which they knew to be supporting evidence that could make or break their case at any time. People would ask the BC hoarder, “How do you ever find anything in that junk heap?” And the BC hoarder would answer, “I have a system.” And the thing is this: They probably did have a system.
 
   Nowadays, someone could outwardly appear to be neat and tidy and to generally have their shit together, but they could secretly still be an information hoarder of the digital sub-species, hordus digitalis. There’s really no way to tell, and no way to pass judgement on the ship-shape-ness of someone’s electronic file management system or lack thereof. Not without poking around on their computers and other devices for a while to see how many digital files and folders they have scattered about and squirreled away. And that’s unlikely to happen unless you’re a first class snoop.
 
   Confession: I am a digital hoarder. My computers (plural) are a maze of multiple drives and files and God-knows-what. I save pretty much everything that enters my digital space. Twenty-year-old emails? Got ‘em. Scans of photos taken prior to the existence of digital cameras? Check. Bootleg installers for old MS-DOS games like Prince of Persia. Roger that.

   It’s ridiculous. Why can’t I bring myself to chuck all this stuff? Is it really just because this information consumes zero real estate, or is there more to it than that? On this I must ponder. But while pondering I’m going to go easy on myself by rationalizing my digital hoarding tendencies in a few different ways.
 
   Here’s one: I don’t put up a front about it. People that know me ought to be able to guess that my digital space is stuffed to the gills. The thing that gives me away is that I still have mountains of papers and books and random notes lying around all over the place. And an old fashioned paperwork hoarder is bound to be a digital hoarder too, even though the reverse is not necessarily so.
 
   Here’s another: I don’t think digital information fundamentally lends itself to organization and purging in the same way that physical (paper) information does. If you have even moderately broad interests, you're bound to encounter digital information that's both wide and deep. In fact, we’re talking about near-infinity here.  I know plenty of people who are obsessed with trying to keep all their computer files spotless and up to date. It's a noble cause, but heaven help them if they enjoy both photography (substitute anything else) and collecting recipes (substitute anything else), because they are constantly bumping into the dangerous value proposition where more time can be invested in organizing information than in understanding it. I worry that it can become Don Quixote business. Why bother inventing the world’s most efficient system for feeding chickens if the chickens don’t lay eggs? I don't think we should be pressuring ourselves to develop a taxonomy of the infinite. That's not the end game. So when it comes to organizing digital information, I consciously sidestep perfectionist pursuits (where one sub-folder can beget another sub-folder that begets another sub-folder in which perfectly-titled files live happily ever after) because I don't want to let myself into that muskrat trap.
 
   And here’s my favorite: Albert Einstein, a notorious messy-desk guy, once said, "If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?"
 
   I know my rationalizations are just that – rationalizations. I know that I'd like to be tidier than I am now so I'm taking a stab at getting organized. I really am. I've been at it for a couple of months now. How goes it, you ask? So far so good. No, wait. It's going better than that. I can honestly say that I've found a specific kind of joy in getting my computer files in better order (and my paperwork too). Yes, I see your hand hovering over the blinking red Nerd Alert button. Go ahead and smack it. Guilty as charged.

   No need to worry though. I see Don Quixote lurking in the shadows. I'm not gonna lose my marbles by going full-tilt O.C.D. on this. I've already surrendered to the idea that there’s simply too much information kicking around nowadays to get it all herded and corralled like I did back in olden times. I get that it’ll never be perfect, so I’m not beating myself up about getting it just so. It'll be mission accomplished if I can say, “I have a system” and not be fibbing.
 
 – O.M. Kelsey