I cared about the future a lot when I was a teenager/early 20's, and was a bit of a digital hoarder. When I was a freshman in college a million years ago (2001) it was common to meet people and trade binders of burned Divx's. I had hundreds, because I might want to watch them someday. My Mp3 collection, tiny by some standards, was still tens or hundreds of gb - and this in an age when a 20GB hard drive was a decent size. I saved every photo I took and curated the folders of them.
Then three things happened
1) Almost everything became easily available (or reasonably easily)
2) Of the things that aren't easily available (personal photos), I realized I never look at it, with very little exception.
3) I realized I am going to die someday, and at the rate I consume media I will _never_ get to even a sizeable fraction of it.
So I try to print the pictures I care about, I have a folder of just a few photos and videos I really care about (mostly my kid), and that's about it really.
Media used to be somewhat scarce, but now basically everything is available everywhere all the time (rights issues notwithstanding). We take a thousand photos on a vacation, not a few rolls of film (72-108 images) It's overwhelming.
I think there really is something to an abundance mentality.
My dad used to hoard, of all things, toilet paper. Why? He grew up in WW2 Philippines, had his house bombed and had to hike up into the mountains where they would shit in the river and wipe their butt with stones.
The idea seems crazy to me and my wife, as does my Taiwanese-born in-laws' predilection toward hoarding food. But we grew up in a world where you can always go to Costco and get more. That wasn't the case even as recently as our parents' generation.
Similarly, today's teens are growing up in a world where you can always go to YouTube or Netflix and get more media, or Google and get more information. The idea that these might be scarce resources and you might need a personal collection, just in case the Internet gets shut off, is as foreign to them as the idea of running out of toilet paper is to me.
This is a really great analogy. I've never thought about this before and I think it explains some of my data hoarding tendencies and maybe this will help me let go of some things a little more. Thanks for sharing this!
Older dude checking in. I threw out my Divx collection about 10 years ago. I have precious little time to spend watching 2-hour films, and I recognize that the number of films I will watch before I die is on the order of maybe 300. When I do get a chance to watch a film, I want the experience to be as great as it possibly can be. I want as high a resolution as I can get with the best color. Compared to 4k HDR stuff available today, the Divx stuff looks like total shit. I have grown to despise my fellow human beings in groups larger than about 7, so I've built a home theater where I can watch a movie without having to deal with the bullshit that is the general public. I'll invite 4 or 5 of my friends over on occasion. Specifically, the ones who respect my rules of watching a movie. No talking, no phones, that sort of thing. I'll buy a Blu-ray disc brand new so I don't have to worry about random scratches or whatever from previous renters. I don't stream because I no longer tolerate any of the bullshit that happens half the time, like random degradation from the service resulting in pixelation or pauses.
For music, I just subscribe to a streaming music service where I can download ("pin") stuff to my phone. Mainly because it's ridiculously cheap and convenient. I don't care about "owning" music, like it could somehow forever "go away" and I'd be sitting in the corner of my basement crying about how I can't listen to such-and-such a song any more. But honestly I'm more likely to listen to audiobooks these days, which I do immediately strip the DRM from and store separately on my phone.
When I go on vacation, I take a pathologically small number of photos, and I only take them on my phone. I can't be bothered with lugging around a huge lens and camera body everywhere I go when I'm trying to experience some place new. Whenever I show the photos to people, they often say, "Wow! What camera did you take these with??" And I say, "A used Pixel 2."
and I recognize that the number of films I will watch before I die is on the order of maybe 300
This kind of thing seems morbid, but as I tiptoe into my 40s I find it hilarious. Got my home's roof redone lately. Allegedly has a 50 year warranty. Mentally added 50 to my current age and was like... well, yep, that oughta do it. hahaha.
When my colleagues say "I worked on this over the weekend" I get pretty upset because
1) Dude you're in your 40's. If you're lucky you've got ~2100 lazy Sunday afternoons left. Probably a third to half of those in decent health. That's not very many. How many of those do you want to spend doing stupid shit (aka most jobs) for somebody else for free?
2) Don't normalize that behaviour so I have to do it too.
The fancy camera is for people that enjoy photography as a hobby in itself, and use trips as an opportunity to practice their skills. But I definitely agree with your "living in the moment" stance. For me, I never take pictures because I can't ever tell in the moment that this would be a good picture that I'd want to show people (that, and pictures never are as good as actually being there).
I tend to take pictures that tend towards the surreal, such as a life sized plastic cow as a lawn ornament [1] or a bear dressed as Goldilocks serving a human skull [2]. Or a human sized teddy bear just chilling out on a park bench [3].
>>I have grown to despise my fellow human beings in groups larger than about 7, so I've built a home theater where I can watch a movie without having to deal with the bullshit that is the general public
To each their own of course. A lot of us go to the theater to enjoy a film with a large crowd.
Concerts and festivals are made more enjoyable by the shared energy. Other than concert movies and maybe Rocky Horror Picture Show, I struggle to think of movies where I’d rather walk on sticky floors to see it with 100 other coughing, talking, texting, etc humans than at home in a decent home theater.
True, but also laughing, cheering, and applauding (on occasion). For a big midnight release a lot of the fun is waiting with other fans - I loved going to openings of movies like Return of the King (LOTR), even the last awful Star Wars prequel, etc. and waiting with hundreds of other excited people at the Fremont Theater - a grand old theater seating 1100. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fremont_Theater
If you haven't seen Rocky Horror in a theater instead of at home, you ought to give it a try. Or The Room - bring spoons.
I'd rather be in the theatre, with a giant screen. Sharing in the appreciation with all the other people there when there's a particularly poignant line, or moment.
Often, it's only slightly better than a home theatre, but I don't want a giant screen I don't use 999% of the time taking up a large part of the wall.
And very rarely, you'll have spectacular moments, where the entire audience shares in a powerful emotion, moments you'll remember for the rest of your life. That you won't get at home.
While not a status statement as it used to be, one element is the "I was there" thing: being able to tell others later that you were there for the opening session of X blockbuster/defining movie...
I watch movies at an accelerated speed, usually around 1.5 to 1.7x speed. That means I can easily watch 2 movies in the span of a couple hours. So basically I'm pretty well caught up on all the obviously good movies. I have some trouble finding hidden gems, mainly because netflix/prime video are so horrible at recommendations.
Because of my accelerated watching I'm actually more selective about movies & tv shows especially TV shows, because only the good ones are tolerable when watching episodes back to back.
I'm guessing you don't like introspective, moody or slow paced movies? I shudder at the thought of watching Wong Kar Wai's "In The Mood For Love" at 1.7x speed...
I have a large and ever-growing (> 100,000) photo collection that isn’t particularly well curated, and I have worried for years that I’m accumulating too many pictures at too low a signal:noise ratio. But now I actually think that I’ll be able to hold out for machine learning to come along and help me get more value out of it. Apple and Google are now good at finding faces, and soon enough I imagine they’ll have pretty good algorithms from sorting good photos from bad ones.
Sometimes you really can just ignore a problem long enough until someone else solves it for you.
I had a hard time letting go of my old digital packrat stuff too. In fact I never fully let go.
Fortunately, thanks to modern storage capacities, I was able to compromise with myself. I stopped packratting new stuff. And the old stuff fits on a single hard drive now. I have a copy of that drive at my brother's place in case something happens to this one.
I'm 99% sure I'll never watch any of that stuff, but a single offline HDD isn't expensive and isn't really taking up much space in my life, so it was a good compromise for me.
I save all my photos and videos I take, I don't feel like it's that much, but still a good 700gb. I personally love having it, and look at it at least a couple of times a year. I just love having access to all this footage. Last week for example we were talking about how our backyard used to look like with my daughter. I was able to pull out old footage of our backyard, and even a video of a tractor cleaning up our backyard. It's nothing vital, but it was very nice for me to be able to look at it again. I'll keep organizing and keeping old photos and videos.
I do agree that mp3 and movies are a bit useless. I still have a 1TB or 500gb drive somewhere full of movies. I probably didn't boot it up in the past 5 years.
The one thing I regret not keeping, is all my projects since I was a kid. I programmed a lot of things between age 10-15. Video games, created art on paint and photoshop. All that is gone. I wish I could access it even if I know it wouldn't be good quality stuff.
As far as pictures go, I've learned to be ruthless with the delete button and only keep photos that I really care about. Mostly, those are the ones with people in them, that record a meaningful moment in history, or with actually interesting subjects. Photography is somewhat of a hobby for me, so I still take a lot of photos, but I'm quick to delete them.
This has the side effect that I can store my entire photo collection (10 years/60 GB) on my phone's SD card where they are easily accessible. This has been valuable, because I refer back to photos I've taken years ago surprisingly often.
I threw out my huge binder of burned CDs (and later DVDs) too. I also threw out all my VHS tapes of my favorite shows that I recorded off the TV in the 90s.
I realized I really don't need to hoard bad video quality anime series'; there's more media that I can realistically consume in a lifetime.
Then three things happened 1) Almost everything became easily available (or reasonably easily) 2) Of the things that aren't easily available (personal photos), I realized I never look at it, with very little exception. 3) I realized I am going to die someday, and at the rate I consume media I will _never_ get to even a sizeable fraction of it.
So I try to print the pictures I care about, I have a folder of just a few photos and videos I really care about (mostly my kid), and that's about it really.
Media used to be somewhat scarce, but now basically everything is available everywhere all the time (rights issues notwithstanding). We take a thousand photos on a vacation, not a few rolls of film (72-108 images) It's overwhelming.