I don’t know where it comes from or why, but suddenly, it is there. An inner obsession captivates me, and focus appears. Flow.

I am talking about the instant need to ... get rid of things.

Everything. More. Now. Bye-bye.

It arrives with force, at times when I feel buried alive underneath my belongings. Suddenly, I want to get rid of stuff, throw things out, and right-click “Empty Bin”. Pressing the delete button gives me a high.

It can be physical: cleaning closets or cabinets, or digital: cleaning my hard drive, deleting old files. The feeling is the same: peace of mind, the serenity of unnecessary items no longer being part of my life.

Throwing things out in the physical world is straightforward. Dust is a good signal about an item’s limited usefulness over time. Items get worn out, you stop using them, or you lack the space.

But what about uselessness in the digital? How many moves between cloud storage providers make sense for a random text file to do before it gets deleted? What happens when you don’t open a document in 15 years?

Will it get sad?

If I physically printed out everything I keep in the cloud, it would take up at least a storage room of folders. I’m sure I would have thrown it out years ago. So why haven’t I?

Does keeping PE hand-ins from high school or group seminar assignments from my first semester of Uni make sense? Should I keep the invoices I got when I renovated an apartment more than ten years ago? I haven’t lived there in at least eight years.

While storing and moving it between Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive occasionally requires minimal effort, it does take up mental space. I have evolved and reinvented myself a hundred times over the time my Dropbox have gathered dust.

Most of the files in my Dropbox have nothing to do with the person I am today. Likewise, many of my archived emails feel like wormholes to a different time. And, sometimes, when I search for something else in there, I find an email reminding me of this whole other life I used to live.

I’m not too fond of that.

Some of the files I’ve saved for years remind me of really unpleasant times in my life — heartbreak, funerals, rehab programs for knee pain, you name it.

What reasonable person saves that?

Well, I used to. But, mostly, I thought high-performing, ambitious people kept their life accomplishments well organised, so I’d better do it, too. Because “you never know” when you need that old cover letter or the CV containing only your first two jobs, right?

Now, I’m unsure whether keeping junk on Google Drive is actually helping my “performance.” And even if it is, I stopped optimising my life for “performance” years ago.

It’s time to delete some more.

Poof