Digital Memories: Hoarder? Pruner? Deleter?

Also: Early Blockchain Music Days, Teenagers and Music, and Constraints in Goals

I’ve been thinking about memory recently. On the one hand, our ability to retain flawless, backed-up digital memory through our smartphones is great. And these days, it’s even searchable. Opening Google Photos also gives you frequent memories from years past, allowing you to reminisce.

However, on the other side, the longer life continues, the more this flawless digital memory can become a visitor that does not leave. For some of us, at this point we have between a decade or two of this catalog of this nature with us. For me, it’s about 14 years now in Google Photos, the first photo taken on 14 Jan 2011 with an HTC Wildfire. This will continue to grow into not just a decade, but two, three, four, and even more. If you were an early digital technologist, you might already have a catalog of this length, stored manually.

If we consider an extreme, it does not feel mentally healthy to have accessible abundant perfect memory like this. Let’s say we get to live to 150, on our 120th birthday, we might have 100+ years of flawless memory to look back on. And imagine, every day, you’re being shown your past? Does it feel claustrophobic to you?

On the one side, it’s great to look back over it all, but the reason why I have trepidation to it, is just a sense that we’re sometimes supposed to forget things. Pre-digital life, that was just it. If it wasn’t captured, then at some point it was forgotten. But, not necessarily on the whole, but rather, becoming compressed. We might forget specific memories, but they’ve formed neural pathways that are a part of who we are now. Much of therapy, for example, is a process of piecing together when and why early neural pathways were formed as they did (and interrogating them). If we had perfect and flawless memory, we risk constantly experiencing the present through the past. To constantly only live in the past does not make a good life.

So, the question I’ve been wondering about recently is how to approach one’s digital memory in a healthy manner. Do you frequently look at the past? Do you enjoy tools like “on this day” or “5 years ago”? For now, I do. For some, however, it can hurt, seeing a happy relationship from the past that’s now gone, a parent that’s no longer with us, or a time when life was more forgiving. One does not want to be reminded of it. But, do you then prune your digital memory? Do you selectively hide it? Or do you selectively delete it? In the extreme, to simply delete all of it all the time?

In pruning, people might delete a bad breakup or separation, wanting to remove someone from one’s memories. If you aren’t pruning that, how do you then feel about keeping emotionally intimate moments? Who becomes the guardians of those shared memories?

I think I’ve been very lucky to have a good relationship with my memories (thus far). And so, my protocol for my digital memories is to keep it going until it feels like I need to be more active about. And so, my question turns to you. How do you deal with your digital memories? A hoarder/keeper? A pruner? A deleter?

Do you think this might change into the future?

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Bonus Content!

This week was filled with more of the same. Writing and walking, mostly.

📺 Watching - Severance, White Lotus, Oscars

✍️ Writing - Novel #2

Different parts of writing a novel is appealing for different reasons. From conceptualising, to finding a story in the first draft. To wrestling revisions and allow the story to properly settle. To refine and ensure what you see is what the reader does. Right now, I’m refining and enjoying it immensely, mostly because it’s starting to meet my own personal standards in patches throughout. I’m excited. :)

🏃‍♂️ Running

I *did* enter the NYC Marathon draw, and as expected, didn’t get an entry. Learned that only 2-3% of people get it. 😅. It was a bit of a hail mary. Still curious about finding a way to run, but not sure what the latter of my year will look like.

💾 Links!

Don’t Stay a Teenager

Speaking of memory. Stumbled upon this great graphic again. Your friendly reminder. Don’t stay a teenager!

Branch out to new music, new ideas, and new culture. You might just like it! :)

Early Blockchain and Music Era

Speaking of music. A big thank you to MacEagon who wrote about the early era where we experimented with blockchains and music (2015-2020). I was a part of the Ujo team.

In 2015, Grushack was part of a team at the defunct “crypto Bandcamp,” Ujo Music, a venture born out of the Ethereum-based software company ConsenSys. In partnership with Grammy-winning artist Imogen Heap’s Mycelia project, they minted and sold her song, “Tiny Human” on the fledgling Ethereum blockchain. “We did all the automated splits and everything,” Grushack told me recently. “We thought it was super cool and was gonna change the world.”

Constrained Goals

If there’s one thing I always see in creative industries is that people get attached to the aesthetics and emulate that instead using the medium for a broader goal. For example, a musician trying to emulate a pop star, or a novelist wanting to be the next Rebecca Yaros. It’s surface-level reproduction of the medium instead of actual deeper understanding of the creative act.

Henrik Karlsson

’s recent essay touches upon this, in ways that people constrain their goals unnecessarily.

The short version is that my friend, in my opinion, thinks about what he wants in a too constrained way.

He writes further about how people can get stuck on a vision without understanding its requisite parts.

Regarding music, the activities he actually likes are (1) coming up with new songs and (2) performing live.

“What would be the most effective way to design your life so that you get to do more of that—assuming nothing about the shape of the solution and reasoning up from first principles?”

Instead of thinking “I want to be a musician (and that means having a label and making albums, and so on),” I suggest that we think about it as a design problem. The first step when designing is to map the constraints on the solution space: what needs to be true for him to move through a week and feel good about it at the end?

And later:

You can’t simply list what you want to do and figure out how to do more of that. You also need to surface the unarticulated constraints that you have floating around, and that are making what you were born to do needlessly hard or impossible. You must bring into light the hidden thoughts that bind you.

I love this, and I think it’s also generally great advice that does not just assume privilege. It *is* sometimes easier to spend time on evaluating your constraints (real or self-imposed) if you are in a position of privilege. But, this does not speak to the dilemma of how and why people create. There are artificial boxes and its merely because they are common and they might not be the right fit for how you want to approach your creative life. There’s a reason common mediums are common, but to create towards it misses the forest for the trees. A novel is just one outcome of telling a story. A novelist is just one type of storyteller. A song is just one outcome of playing music. A songwriter is just one form of making music. And so forth. Interrogate what you enjoy.

🎶 Music

Ela Minus - BROKEN

Great find. Bjork-ish energy to it. Enjoy!

Have a great week friends. Remember to find a great sunset to marvel at.

Simon