I’ve experienced two major losses in my life. They were like my children, if I can grasp the slightest meaning of what it’s like to have a child.
RIP my iPhone and my 2TB LG external hard drive.
When I lost my phone in London last November, it had 20,000 photos dating back to my high school years and some of the travel notes I hadn’t yet moved to Word. I didn’t use iCloud back then; I do now but my Mac keeps saying I don’t have enough memory space so it stopped automatic backups a few months ago. When I realized my phone (along with my wallet) was gone from my purse that night, I was surprisingly calm. I filled out some form at the lost and found and spent two months without a phone until I got my current one.
Of course, I was wrecked in the inside, as if a big chunk of my life suddenly disappeared. But there was nothing I could do with the lost photos. ‘Those memories aren’t lost,’ I consoled myself. Those times weren’t lost either. A vague fear that someone with malicious intentions might figure out my passcode and illegally use my personal information haunted me for a while, but nothing really happened so I moved on.
A few days ago, I lost most of the files on my EHD due to some virus it got from the local printing shop. There were not just my phone photos and videos; it had all of my schoolwork in high school and in college, extensive journal writings and poems and short stories, dearly treasured shenanigans and travel pictures with my family and friends all over the world since 2013—bits and pieces that I wanted to keep so I could look back on my life in the future when my memory fades.
Still, there is a meager hope of restoring the lost files since, weirdly enough, the storage bar indicates the same amount of space occupied as before. But I decided not to hope for the best. One of my favorite English words, “decathect” means detaching or distancing yourself from something in prediction of future loss, most often resulting from a fear of disappointment.
Ironically, I had written these notes earlier that day the event happened. I didn’t trim much because I didn’t know how to be more honest so bear with my stream of consciousness.
“Too much data is giving me headaches
Backup the backup
For what?
I don’t know what to do with all the pictures and videos
I don’t feel like posting them online because I don’t want to be that kind of person who advertises their life as perfect
I don’t like spending way too much time on editing pictures and videos
Need to empty, decluster everything
Don’t you want to record your life your youth remember the good old days?
I really don’t know.
I want to keep creating –
But sometimes I just want to disappear without a trace.”
“Excess of data in this data-driven world
From young age we learn how to record our life digitally
Unlike our former generations
But overflow of vivid memories vs. faded stories smelling of nostalgia
GoPro is stripping of the reality from our reality, we constantly live in either the past or the future
Isn’t that the tingly, aching, yearning, missing feeling, of saudades, that we love about what memories are? If memories are no longer memories but a parallel, or two, or hundreds of then-now, how can you live in the present?
Those pictures were just memory aides, if you rely on them you’ll lose your own brain power
Vestigial function in the modern era
Think of the Greeks or Romans or Native Americans how they would recite epic poems in the plaza and tell tales of their ancestors around the woodfire”
It feels like I get a huge blow of emotional attack whenever I need to—whether I recognize or not—redirect my perspectives. This sort of thought is recurrent, from the very first post “Everything Meta” and again in “Flea Market, and Inheritance of Memory.” The more I live, the more I have this fear of leaving too much behind. Ever-growing entropy. Overload of data. (I contradict myself in that I’m excluding writing, but I’ll think about this later.) What will happen when the world is overly saturated with all our information? Some will be preserved, some will be trimmed. But what’s the criteria?
I’ve always been attracted to minimalism but never had own resolution to partake in it. I like the freedom of simplicity in living because it generates simple mind, but I also like the fleeting pleasures one can get from possessing. I think it’s healthy to let some objects define small moments of your life, as long as you’re not bound to them. But in the end, I’d like to live like a river that flows cleanly and merges with the bigger, calmer ocean. Freeing from the self and reaching nirvana in Buddhism is often described as that process, as a river loses its former name and qualities to go back to the original.
Kerry Temple writes in Back to Earth, on a similar note:
“These are the souvenirs we take away, the meanings, the memories. We leave nothing behind. And when we pass away, our tracks will fade, our imprint gone, our lives hardly missed in the grand scheme of things, leaving all this to carry on in its eternally inscrutable way.
Sometimes, when I measure my life against the grand lords of rock that stare blankly at the sky, I can accept my smallness. It is enough to know I am part of all this. And I am glad to know that, when my time has come, my body will return to the clay and my spirit will find its place in the earth’s wild woods. And I am glad to be making friends here now.”
Like him, like Thoreau and Emerson and Whitman, I want to seek from the inside, not from materials. Yet I’ve got a long way to go. I want to graduate college; I want to get a fulfilling job where I can grow as a person and help others in some way; I want to have secular fun with people I love. I’m still young, and I’m not that heroic enough to actually pursue that way of living yet.
But from time to time, when you’re stripped of the externalities of life just like I lost all my files, you see what’s more important—like family, friends, love, laughs, rather than the pixel replica of them. The losses I’ve experienced made me rethink about my intentions in photographing, writing, living. In that sense, I’m thankful for what happened.
I really want to focus on what’s important. I want to live on the real side of the world. I’m writing this, in hopes that this will enhance that live experience for myself and for others. Being human, I know I’ll continue creating data as I always have. And I’ll keep losing it too. But I know that’s okay.
Jiannadawn 