The Deletist

I often don’t give my brain enough credit for the processing it does each day.  When I fail to remember something important I’m quick to be self-critical, chastising my brain for forgetting.  But this doesn’t take into account the thousands of things my brain “deletes” so that I can go through my daily routine unhampered by mundane details that frankly would just clog up the gray matter.

I noticed that a lot of people use social media apps, such as Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram to capture a moment in time of something funny, cool, extraordinary, etc. with a post and/or a photo.  Surely these small snippets in time are something that you will want to remember forever and ever.  But to me, it’s externally storing weird, silly things that I forgot for a reason. I trust my brain to go through the accumulation of a day’s memories and do some deleting so that it doesn’t get cluttered up.

A lot of stuff I have posted on social media, which admittedly is not much, is nice to have and look at, but if it wasn’t there my life would not be greatly impacted.  Maybe I should feel relieved to have some memories captured in external storage where I can benefit from having them, without taxing my precious brain to remember all these tiny, insignificant things.

In the last year I’ve read about memory apps that will aggregate timelines, posts and images from different sources, social media included, to provide the user with a “memory”.  The apps make connections by linking dates, places and people together, but this is not necessarily how a human brain would remember something.  Human brains link and connect things in all kinds of strange, meandering ways.   Maybe the trigger is a smell, a person, a type of food, or an event.  The path taken to the memory is quite different than the one prescribed by a memory app suggesting how and what I should be remembering when.

Are we losing something by keeping too much or by “forcing” the reconstruction of memories?  I’m assuming many people appreciate the benefits that come with using social media to keep track of events and people and places visited.  If my brain forgets something, I trust the reason behind it and appreciate my brain’s amazing capabilities to do this work for me.

Every time I attend a conference I dread the email aftermath because I know that the list of registrants gets passed along to all the vendors. This means for weeks, and sometimes months, I am besieged with a relentless torrent of emails advertising this or promoting that. Gmail attempts to alleviate the problem by pre-sorting emails into categories: Primary (for the real stuff), Promotions (ads and promotionals), Social (social media updates), Updates, etc.

This is useful for separating the quality from the quantity, but it doesn’t really solve the problem.   Some years ago I discovered the magic of the “unsubscribe” option listed in tiny, microscopic print at the very bottom edge of the email.  Ever since then I immediately unsubscribe to any lists that junk up my inbox.

Initially I had some reservations because I didn’t want to miss out on updates, even though most of it ended up being flagged to read later and would just sit there for months. Eventually I defined criteria about what I would and wouldn’t keep to read and started cleaning up my inbox by limiting what could come into it in the first place.  I made executive decisions, deleted like crazy and let go of my expectations to read every interesting email I received.  I also started prioritizing which updates were important and which ones I could delete, or unsubscribe to, without any guilt about it.

Unsubscribing has become part of my normal routine.  Last night a friend was telling me about her experience with unsubscribing.*  She explained that she thought of the unsubscribe option when her emails piled up because she fell behind on deleting the updates and newsletters.  Her new solution was to just stop receiving them.  Sometimes we see email apps on our friends’ phones with thousands of unread emails. We were speculating that maybe the pile up happens because people get subscribed to lists and just ignore, or delete, the emails instead of unsubscribing.

If you find your inbox getting crowded with emails you would rather not receive, or you feel guilty because you’re not reading them, unsubscribe!  It’s mandatory for email subscription services to offer this option.  It’s even available for The Deletist, but I hope you’ll keep that one!

On another note, other update options exist via social media channels that don’t involve email, but that’s a topic for another day.

*Inspiration for today’s blog!