6.20.26 - Intermission - Moving and Owning Things and Information
At some point when I was ramping up for bar prep on Monday, it dawned on me that I had a cross-state move coming up and I have a lot of stuff.
My brain, which has been classified as a severely ADHD type, has some hyperfocus tendencies and I could not resume my work knowing I had this outstanding task. So instead of bar prep, I spent this last week packing up for my move, putting my items into storage, and cataloging my belongings.
Today I'm essentially done, and the whole affair was a deeply revealing process.
First, some background. Unlike most people my age, I don't really have a family house as home base. My parents are divorced, and both of them are at stages of their lives where they have downsized or moved. As a result of that--and because I generally don't trust my family to keep records organized--I'm the main guardian of our photo albums, records, documents, etc. I have the original copies of my mom's baby photos. Of my dad's diplomas. Of all of school papers my mom held on to. Of old hard drives that predated reliable, automatic cloud backups.
I've spent an enormous amount of hours sorting these things. And I was simply astounded at the amount of information that has endured about my life (my parents have a good deal of records too, but far less) because of my mom keeping things, and me periodically sorting them and curating them throughout my life.
Going through it made me feel a little old (27 now), and realize how much the world has changed in my life span.
I have some copies of the first pictures printed of me after I was born, which are quite small (about 1 inch tall) and as I understand were sent to family members and friends in the mail to announce my brith. I have nearly every daily log from my pre-K daycare in a folder--what I ate, how I behaved, etc. I have hundreds of photos of early childhood and family parties. I have soo many school esays and notebooks. I have my parents olds school notebooks. I have nearly every photo and image I've taken or saved since I had a smartphone in 2013 (although I've trimmed this down a lot). I have every photo I've ever shotten on film since I started in 2015, and for the most part the original negatives sorted in a binder. I have negatives of photos taken of me when I was 4 (I bought a really high resolution film scanner recently, and I've rescanned these at stupidly high resolution to give my mom a nice print as a gift). I have iMessage histories that go back decades. I have all of my notebooks/diaries which I have kept since junior year of high school. I have physical calendars and agendas (a practice I still hew to) as well as backups of old iCloud calendars. You can probably rebuild my day to day life since college with very high accuracy, high school more roughly, and before then you could in some portions, but there would be large gaps.
Even my dog (god rest his soul) has an insane amount of records--endless photos and videos, all his vaccination papers, the whelping certificate from his breeder, his family lineage (he was a pure bred).
It's just a mind boggling amount of information to have on one person. Why do we hold on to all of this?
Well, thanks in part to this mostly being paper and hard drives, it isn't PHYSICALLY out of volume. It all fits in like, a third of a bedroom. But what on earth are we going to do with all of this?
Maybe other families have figured this out. But because mine was quite poor until a about my grandparents, records don't go that far back. So it's a relatively new problem. Since the world is getting richer, and because record keeping is cheap, I imagine this is an expanding problem though.
Where does all of this go? Who benefits? I don't. I hardly look at this stuff. I would like to believe it would be of some interest to future generations. But surely not all of it.
I don't have a clear answer in my mind. I suspect with some constant curation, and trimming (which happens naturally each time you move, or someone dies) it should remain manageable. I think its neat that my great great great grandkids could theoretically print out high resolution pictures of their ancestors either from negatives, or preserved high quality digital files, for their future study or something.If they have a house a big enough. Would they care to? Maybe. If I had a house, and I had generations of information to tap into, I would definitely find it interesting ot have a small photo wall that went back in time with some desciptive plques or something. A lot of white families I know already have this. I have a very rich german friend who has a family seal and shit, and he has records going way back and his grandparents house has photos going back as long as we've had the ability to take photos (which really isn't that many generations).
But in the future this will be available to basically EVERYONE. Lets say the average person in America has only been taking photo since 1900 (the advent of the kodak Brownie). Even that's pretty generous, but that puts it us at literally only 126 years of content. ANd given that prservation wasn't as easy when everyone was poorer, climate control wasn't available, and we didn't have digital scans as backups, a lot of people only have degraded copies, or third generations of these photos. My girlfriend's family is a typical case. There are photos of weddings going back to the 1920s. But what her mom has is a print out of a digital scan from a CD done in the early 2000s. Not sure who has the original copy.
But yes, back to the original point, the average person only has a 126 years of content at MAX, and a much shorter timeframe where things are reliably kept. Lets say that the average middle class family can more readily afford climate controlled storage if they desired. And lets say they take care every few years to migrate their digital information to a solid state drive, curate their physical documents and photos, etc. Lets say this practice persists across generations for relatively stable family lines (this is a big filter I would imagine, a lot of record keeping is probably interrupted simply because of estrangement, moving, life getting in the way, etc.).
Many individuals in the 2200s, say, would have orders of magnitude more family history than any person who has ever lived. More than modern day monarchs. Not because it sjust more time since the advent of the relevant technologies, but because we all just create more records as a result of them. It would be an endless sea of information that is intimately tied to them. I think that's insane. How will that change our relationhsip to the past? What will it be like to have high definition baby videos of your great great great great grandparents? To have their apples notes libraries? To have a powerful AI be able to mine these records for genealogical insights?
For many people, this will not be possible because things will just get lost, deleted, spread out, and no one cared to consolidate it in a manageable way. Even though it was technically possible, it requires a good deal of family coordination and attention that most people don't care enough to do. I think I'm holding on to this stuff on the off chance that my kids will care enough to continue the curation project and leave something interesting behind for people in 2200. Will see if it holds.
But on another note, seeing the sheer volume of stuff has made me decide to be more deliberate in what I create. I am now not making anew notes for every odd thing (where I parked in the parking garage), but using a single "scratch paper" in Obsidian. I am taking less phone photographs, more film pones. I am throwing more shit away as I make it. This means I don't have to do future curation, and that most things I have on hand matters. I think this is a good practice in general. Less, more meaningful records for the remainder of my life.
knxnts