I like order, structure, organization. Giving things a place brings me joy. Sparks joy I guess in organizer-guru-speak. And sure, whenever I moved there were always moments of anguish and hopelessness whenever I needed to pack stuff and take it all out. The moment you have lost all of your energy and the physical stuff is all around you on the ground. Been there, done that.

However, for the organized person I am, my own digital archive is not that well-structured at all. At work, I thrive when deciding on a file naming system or cleaning up folders and putting them together. When I look at my own collection of videos, photos and (important?) documents I want to cry.

It is of course a grand paradox that because we now have seemingly infinite space to store stuff, this makes us more careless about how much stuff we create. And of course visuals take up a large part of this ‘overcreation’. Everyone probably has at least one thing that they constantly record, and mine is mostly sports.

I think many sports are some combination of techniques and visuals. And it is great that we have so much visuals to learn from and improve with, but it can also be impeding. I record myself dutifully every session, but I do not tend to look back at it too much. I know I will be focusing on a bent leg or flexed foot. Did that flow got interrupted because of the buffering or is it my movement? It simply does not spark joy for the most part.

Moreover, there is not only the stuff I film myself, I have external platforms that I check or neglect to check. There is a constant feeling of having too much and not making use of its potential. It is the opposite end of the subscription scheme. There is too much stuff we do not own, and too much of the stuff that we do own. Balance is lost.

Instead of limiting ourselves to saving the things we find very important, we are being ruled by the amount of digital space available. Enticed to pay for increased space, which just means a brief respite to look away ant not at all of the stuff that we record. I am only limited by my unwillingness to pay for things, which results in brief outbursts of downloading, deleting and quickly putting things together in one folder so everything else seems to be in order. Eventually I will look at it. Probably not.