The Archive
We’re terrified of losing moments. Not just the big ones – weddings, births, graduations – but all of them. The ordinary Tuesday. The inside joke. The extraordinarily-ordinary moments. We’re so afraid these moments will disappear that we’ve convinced ourselves if we just hold on tight enough, archive enough proof, we can make them permanent.
A doll’s head, just the head, plastic cracked and yellowing, sticks out from under a pile of water damaged magazines from 1987.
Next to it, a lamp with no shade and a dusty bulb flickers its dimming amber glow, balanced on top of three banker’s boxes that are split at the seams, their contents spilling out:
crumpled receipts
unopened envelop
VHS tapes, unlabeled and unknown
mothballs of hair, dust, and random debris.
There’s also a garbage bag, the black heavy-duty kind, ripped open. From it spills a jumble of clothes which now lay haphazardly on the dingy and grimy, matted and crusted, yellow-brown carpet.
Expensive clothes.
A cashmere sweater, tag still on.
Cheap clothes. A stained t-shirt from an disbanded underground band
And memorable clothes.
A wedding dress, yellowed and frayed
lace torn half-in and half-out of the bag
train disappearing under a tower of shoeboxes.
This was supposed to be a living room.
You can tell because there’s a couch somewhere under everything. If you squint hard enough, you can see the armrest, fabric torn, stuffing coming through. Someone cared enough to buy it, arrange it, maybe even picked out that fabric.
And then they cared so much about everything else that the couch disappeared.
That’s what all of this is, really. Hoarding: an archive of loss.
That’s the thing about hoarding that makes it so devastating to witness: it’s not that the person doesn’t care. It’s that they care so much, so obsessively, so completely, that they’ve destroyed the very thing they were trying to protect. That’s what all of this is, really. Hoarding: an archive of loss. Each object represents something that ended: a moment, a person, a version of themselves, kept thinking it preserves what was lost. But it doesn’t. It can’t. The doll’s head doesn’t really bring back a child’s forgotten laughter. The wedding dress isn’t the joyous occasion of love.
***
Open your photos app. Check the number on the bottom. Ten thousand photos? Twenty?
When did you last look at them? Not scrolling past, hunting for something specific. Not showing someone a photo from last weekend. Actually sitting down, going through your camera roll, reminiscing.
You can’t remember. Most of us can’t.
You screenshot recipes and cafes because you’ll become the person who cooks elaborate Sunday dinners and explores the city instead of defaulting to home. The college brochure and the workout routine too – these aren’t just images. They’re screenshots of promises.
Except we’re not keeping them. The recipe stays buried and the cafe closes before you visit. You screenshot the workout routine again six months later, having forgotten you already saved it. And slowly, the future you were building becomes another past you’re clinging to.
Then there are other photos. The ones that aren’t about becoming but about having been. Your best friend mid-laugh. The group photo from the trip where everyone’s actually in frame and smiling. These photos should be easy to sort through: keep what matters, delete what doesn’t.
Except you don’t just keep those. You keep the seven blurry versions you took before getting that perfect shot; the screenshot of a text conversation you felt meaningful at the time; the inside-joke photo that’s so dark you can barely see anything, but you remember laughing. Maybe these are meaningful. Maybe they do capture something real about who you were. But you’ve kept them alongside everything else with the same desperate grip. The photo of your best friend’s laugh, a moment that captures something irreplaceable, is buried under hundreds of photos that might matter, could matter, felt like they mattered in the moment.
We’re not so different from the hoarder after all. They hoard the past. We hoard both the past and future, screenshots of who we want to become and photos of who we were, the significant and barely-significant, mixed until they’re indistinguishable. That’s what makes digital hoarding so much worse: the physical hoarder might not be able to move through their living room, but we can’t move through time.
Delete the recipe and you’re confronting your own inertia, the gap between who you said you’d become and who you actually are. Delete the blurry inside-joke photo and you’re admitting that moment wasn’t as significant as you wanted it to be. That most moments aren’t.
When everything is saved, nothing is sacred.
When everything is saved, nothing is sacred.
Like the hoarder’s couch, disappearing under boxes, our significant memories disappear under the weight of fantasises we’re not pursuing and moments we’ve convinced ourselves might matter someday.
Memory was never meant to be perfect. It fades, distorts, reshapes itself each time we recall it – and that’s not a flaw, it’s what makes it human. When you remember your best friend’s laugh, you don’t replay it frame by frame. You remember the warmth. The way it made you feel seen. The memory becomes yours in a way the original never was.
But in our fear of leaving what’s significant to something so fragile, so human, somewhere among the thousands of photos, that ordinary Tuesday we were so afraid of losing has already disappeared.