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Digital Mindfullness
The digital worlds we in habit get cluttered very quickly. My pictures folder is a mess of screenshots, family photos, memes, and printouts. The documents folder a mess of pdfs, text files. If this were a physical environment it would be a mess. You would never be able to find anything, the hord would only grow larger and larger. Over 2000 family photos? How are you suposed to look through them? How are we suposed to live with them?
It has been my experience that humans have a limited amount of congnivte power that they can put twords a collection, a library. My Mom's Dad is a horder, the hord consumes his life and his mind. How can you have a collection without draining you of life? The key diffrance here is between a hord and a library. I think a library is a carfully selected arangment of items. Not archived for the sake of archiving everything, but archived because I find the item important to my life. Somthing that gives life spice and texure. A hord is chaotic, never discarding anything for fear of loosing the past. Its the fear of not archiving all of exsistance. It is pure bibliomania.
Because what I am afraid of hear is a reality where we allways focus upon the past. Remebering the good old days through our pictures. If anything our picture should simply remind us of what is possible. Because sometimes we forget that life is beutiful and strange. "Remebering the good old days" is dangerous in the way that is creates a fantized reality. Living out the past means we cannot live out the pressent. We become patients of some cursed form of dementia: never able to live, only able to remeber. A library should remind of us of the past so that we can live through the future. Im afraid of this film becoming a reality?
For digital spaces we should practice mindfulness. Say we have a folder. I look at each file and ask a question: does it fulfil a task? does it bring me joy? does it teach me about the past? If it does then copy it to a safe location. Once you are done looking at all the files, delete the folder. I do belive that letting go is a important part of living a focused, meanigful life. It gives us a sence of control, it gives purpose and life to the files you keep. Charish files that are part of your life.
I do think the danger of minimalism is forgeting the past. This is a problem I'd like to think more on. I don't know where the line lays between forget and remember. Perhapes bibliomania is not a bad thing as long as we have the propor tools to treverce it? Some kind of transhumanism where we break past our limited ablities. It's just... It seams to be possible to know alot without knowing anything at all, if you know what I mean? To know the history of a restrant chain, the history of a sports team. I mean really... are these important to knowing what life is? We can know so much sumatic knowlage that we forget what it actually is we are experienceing. We get lost in a world of factoids and drama. Fuck it bro... show me the real shit, you know? The stuff that is aplicable to reallity. The stuff that is aware of the mechanics or the REAL univerce. The problem is we cannot exscape our reality. We exsist in a univerce with laws of gravity, of decay, of molecular stucture. There seam to be technics that help people, and tequnics that hurt people. If the physical cosiquences of our fictional univerces and collections hurt people, then I think we are doing something wrong. The goal is to create collections that do not propegate the destruction of reality. (funy place ive worked myself into eh? XD)
I think mindfulness is important. Otherwise nothing will have meaning. Nothing will have purpose. At least for now, we are our huamn bodies and human phycy. Idk.