Lifelogging

Wearable devices and new technological capabilities are increasing the ease with which people can participate in lifelogging, the act of capturing and recording every moment of your life, kind of like a diary.  The first time I heard about this in 2005 in reference to Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBits project, the only thing I could think was why would this be appealing?  (Article here.)

Fitbits, smartwatches, and attachable cameras are all examples of wearable devices worn on the body to record and track various aspects of our lives.  Naturally apps have been developed to create lifelogs and attract followers, such as Saga, Lifelogger, and Narrative (video below).

As The Deletist this is exactly the kind of mindless saving that makes me wonder, what’s the point?  To just blindly capture, record, track, and save every moment of my life just because I can seems a bit pointless to me.  People barely take the time to go through photos, videos, and other types of recordings that they make consciously.  Who would take the time to go through the volumes of data captured automatically to weed out the crappy stuff?  Also, many of my memories are formed around intangible sensations, like smells, touch, and emotions, the kinds of things technology is not good at capturing and connecting.

As an archivist, and somebody who prefers quality over quantity, I have serious issues with dumping everything into some magical “archive.”  Where’s the lifelog curator app?  When so many things are acquired and saved without criteria or a plan, the new challenge is not to retrieve the desired information, but rather to remember that you even have it to search through.  I suppose the goal of the lifelog “archive” is to index everything so meticulously that you wouldn’t have to remember if you had it.  You could just ask any question and have the searching done automatically, of course with the understanding that anything stored, including unpleasant memories you may be working hard to forget, could also be retrieved.

Naturally I also feel nervous thinking about the security involved with maintaining huge amounts of personal data.  I’ve personally never considered having a lifelog.  I have enough information to manage as part of my daily life and I’m not arrogant enough to think every minute of my daily life is worth retaining.  There’s a reason human brains are designed to forget things.

Release

I’ve been playing music for over 30 years.  One of the things I love best about music is creating something each time I play my instrument.

A couple summers ago I participated in a weekly event called Classical Social.  Musicians showed up at a certain time in a bar.  We were grouped together based on our instruments and had to sight read music in front of the patrons.  While we played, people would post pictures and clips of the performances to various social media sites.  I loved the involvement and participation, but having everything recorded often created a conflict between my memories and interpretation versus what I could replay.

One of my least favorite pieces of music is Ravel’s Bolero, both for listening and performing.  The beginning of the piece features the bassoon with one of the hardest solos in our entire repertoire.  After that stress is over, the bassoon plays the same note over and over for five pages of music.  Super boring.

Four years ago I flubbed the solo during a performance, which happened to have been recorded.  I finally listened to it a couple of years later though I felt conflicted about it.  The recording re-enforces a singular way to remember the performance.  It doesn’t afford me the luxury to recreate my memory of the event in anyway other than the one where I messed up, one where I might be able to convince myself it wasn’t really that bad.  (Admittedly, it wasn’t really that bad.  At the very least, I started and ended at the right times.)

However, I don’t need the recording to act as a constant reminder of what did and didn’t happen.  The memory of the piece lives in my cells and tissues.  Just hearing the familiar staccato beat of the snare drum is enough to make my palms sweaty and my stomach queasy, even if it’s playing on the radio or in a commercial.

I couldn’t imagine my life without being able to listen to music whenever I want, but at the same time, I don’t necessarily enjoy having my playing recorded.  For me the thrill and enjoyment is in the live performance.  Once I play the notes they’re released into the universe and I can focus on the next ones coming at me, remaining fully present in the moment.

Transforming Our Stuff

When my father died going through his personal affairs was a huge process.  Not only was there a lot of stuff, but it all reminded me of him.  I often felt cranky and upset.  We packed up some of his favorite clothes to keep.  A woman in my bereavement group had mentioned that she had a quilt made out of her mother’s clothes.  She said it was a huge comfort for her.  I decided that would be a nice idea to do with dad’s clothes, at some point.

After a few years we made a feeble attempt at finding a quilter.  More years passed, without the quilts.  Finally, sometime around the 12-year anniversary of his death I decided it was time to get the quilts.  His clothes had been sitting virtually untouched in a bedroom closet, getting older and more fragile with each passing year.

A few internet searches later, I found someone in Virginia who specialized in Memory Quilts. I picked a size and placed the order.  Next we picked which clothes we wanted for our quilts. We dumped the clothes onto the floor and started pawing through the pile.  We ended up with four bags, one for each of us and one of items shared between me and my brother.

The quilter let us pick background colors.  We left the patterns up to the quilter.  She updated us on the progress.  A few months later, the quilts arrived!

My memory quilt. Royal blue was one of my father's favorite colors.

My memory quilt. Royal blue was one of my father’s favorite colors.

Here’s my mother’s quilt.

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Mom’s quilt.

And my brother’s quilt with the nice, sunny background.

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My brother’s quilt. Nice sunny, background.

I thought I would feel sad and cranky going through his clothes to pick them for the quilts, but it ended up being cathartic. I even learned a couple things, like my father still had his wedding shirt from 1970! Who knew he was so sentimental!  My mother, naturally, selected this one for her quilt. Interestingly enough, even though the wedding shirt was only in my mother’s pile, the quilter somehow intuited its importance and managed to sneak a little piece into every quilt.

I love the quilt. It’s a huge relief to and comfort for me to have transformed his clothes into something useful, protective, and nice to look at.

Playing for Keeps

A lot of people tell me they have problems getting rid of things for a variety of reasons.  Sometimes it’s too overwhelming to find a starting point.  Naturally items to which we are strongly attached emotionally will pose more of a challenge than others.  I certainly have categories of things that are more difficult for me to purge (e.g. jewelry, shoes, scarves).

When attempting to declutter, or purge, most people focus on things that they don’t want to keep.  My mother taught me a new strategy that I’ve found quite useful.  When my mother purges she focuses on what she wants to keep rather than purge.

Over the last two months I acquired 6 new pairs of socks (4 gifts, 2 purchased), prompting me to reevaluate my hard-to-close sock drawer.

The newest additions to the sock drawer.

The newest additions to the sock drawer.

 

I LOVE having fun, fresh socks to wear.  And since most of my favorite pairs were given to me as gifts I have a hard time parting with them (sentimental reasons).  One time I had a black pair with moose on them given to me by one of my favorite people in the world.  Even when the heels ripped open and the toes started to wear thin I put them on over a base pair just to keep them a little longer.

Since I know socks are one of my harder things to purge, I decided to try out my mom’s strategy.  I dumped all my socks onto the bed and plucked out my favorites.  It was fast and easy to review the sock pairs and select the ones I loved best to keep.  Then I moved onto the “maybe” pairs and swiftly processed them into one of three piles: Keep, Trash, Donate.  The rest were all donated, unless they didn’t make it through the quality assurance test.

I ended up throwing out 4 pairs in sad condition, donating 13 pairs, and changing my mind about 2 pairs.  One pair was too ratty to donate, but could still be worn a couple more times, even without a base layer.  And the other pair belonged to my father, again sentimental reasons.

Psychologically, I enjoyed selecting my most favorite things to keep and then purging the rest.  Somehow it felt nicer and easier than selecting things to purge, even though I accomplished both in the end.

 

Nature Hates a Void

A short time ago I was tidying up some things in my bathroom for a party I was hosting.  I decided to remove some things from one of the open shelves to make sure nothing got accidentally bumped off by my guests.  Even though my bathroom has a perfectly useable and empty medicine cabinet with a door on it, I refused to use it. Instead I elected to store the items in a box which I stashed in my bedroom.  It seemed funny to me that I remained committed to not using the empty cabinet even though it would have been very temporary.

When I moved in I decided to remove the medicine cabinet, even though it’s still on the to-do list.  I’ve actually found it’s quite handy for visitors to place their toiletries when they stay over.  However, I’m quite strict about using it for myself.  My feeling is that once I “move in” it’s just going to become another space I’ll end up filling over time.

After graduating, one of my first jobs required me to clean up 60+ years of backlog for the directors’ offices at a public library.  This included files for all past and present directors from the last 6 decades.  The records clerk and I processed the files with great gusto, destroying some and sending others onto the city archives.  In about 6 months we had reduced the volume to 1/3 of its original size.

When I do this kind of work, people are always extremely appreciative and then immediately start to wonder about how to prevent future accumulations. One of my less conventional recommendations is to remove half the shelving, thereby forcing people to run out of space faster and address their growing pile of files more regularly.  If the space is there, you will fill it.

This strategy will also work with digital files.  Tired of accumulating so many digital photos and electronic documents?  Limit your storage space rather than always buying more to accommodate a bunch of digital files that you probably don’t even remember, will never look at again, and bring you no value.  As an added bonus, you will also save time with upgrades, migrations, and backups.

Tip: keep your electronic and physical possessions lean and mean by restricting your space and forcing yourself to use what’s available to store your things. Save strategically.

Making Space

When I selected “The Deletist” to be the name of my blog, I had a minor concern that people might think I was all about destruction.  However the message of The Deletist is not about destroying things, but rather emphasizes the merits of saving strategically.  This enables us to focus our time, money, and energy on the things that matter to us.

Whenever I feel like something is not going well in any aspect of my life (e.g. health, relationships, finances, career, etc.), the first thing I do is purge.  Getting rid of things that no longer bring me value is my symbolic way of making space for new things to come into my life.  And the purging doesn’t necessarily have to be related to the part of my life that is not working well.  For example, if I feel like my health is not 100%, I don’t focus on the bathroom or whatever areas I identify as being related to my health.  I just start somewhere, anywhere.  It could be the fridge, my storage unit, or even the coat closet.

My purging projects are not restricted to physical items.  I will often go through my contact lists in email or on social media apps to make sure the connections are worthwhile to me.  The other week I revisited my LinkedIn connections and removed 20 that weren’t beneficial.  Although I can add an infinite amount of people on LinkedIn, I prefer quality over quantity and focus on making mutually favorable connections.

When I elect to make space, I perceive any small advance as being productive.  From my experiences, I know that sometimes people have challenges finding a starting point because the activity as a whole seems overwhelming or too time consuming.  That’s why I sometimes start with a single drawer or shelf.  It’s small and easy to get through, fills me with confidence, and provides a boost of motivation.

To me, purging things is about creating opportunities for new things to come into your life.  And that starts by making space for them.  Once you create space, be mindful of how/why you’re using it so it doesn’t get filled up with junk as you’ll read about in next week’s post, Nature Hates a Void.