The Life-Changing Magic of Digital Decluttering

In April, I sent out a letter called “How To Disappear,” which was about my changing relationship with the internet and wanting, but not knowing how, to be online less. As a brief addendum to that, I recently deleted my unused accounts on “Twitter replacement” attempts like Hive, Post, and Spoutible. Before that, I deleted a Mastodon account. If these names sound like gibberish to you, congratulations! You are living life correctly. For those of us whose livelihoods are still largely reliant on Twitter… Well, we panicked a bit and tried them all. That mentality is partly what inspired my letter from April. You can consider this month’s letter an update of sorts, but I don’t think disappearing is the right word anymore. Decluttering is more accurate.

I love throwing things away. One of the main decluttering tips in Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up is asking yourself whether an object brings you joy - whatever that means to you - and if it does, you keep it. If it no longer serves any functional or emotional need for you, let it go. Without putting that exact language to it before, this is something I’ve done every time I’ve moved to a new apartment or during my semi-annual spring cleaning. Organizing, itself, is what brings me joy. Unfortunately, I am not an “out of sight, out of mind” person. I know exactly what may or may not be piling up in various junk drawers. (This is not a brag, by the way, in case you couldn’t tell. It's actually quite annoying.) 

Because I grew up in the era where the internet was just this weird place I’d spend a few hours after dinner, its slow takeover of my physical life snuck up on me. The short stories, book and music reviews, and general interest essays I read in home-delivered magazines were online now, as was the news. Phone conversations with friends turned into texts and emails, creating searchable archives behind as opposed to just ending. Every photo I’ve taken over the last ten to fifteen years lives in a digital cloud of some sort. And even physical errands that surely could never be digitized, like banking or grocery shopping, can be done via screen. 

There are pros and cons to this new world we’ve created, which is a letter for another day, but what all of these tiny changes added up to for me is the realization that my clutter-free existence was far from tidy. I became an “out of sight, out of mind” person after all, and all because I didn’t think of the internet as a place where my real life exists even though so much of it does, and has for a while. 

This might be a good place to say that a desire to tidy can be a coping mechanism for people with anxiety. When my physical space is clutter-free, it's easier for my brain to make space for what matters. (To be clear, this is not the same as having OCD, which is a still-too-common misconception and a woeful misunderstanding of what OCD is.) The act of organizing is also just genuinely enjoyable for me, so really it's a win-win. 

Truly, I am excited about this digital decluttering project even though I know it'll be long and, likely, tedious at times. Deleting unused accounts didn't leave me with the same elation as when I deleted my Facebook account in 2018, but they were a good start. Next up, going through favorited tweets to pull out the articles or book recommendations I actually want, and tackling my browser’s bookmarks to ask myself, “do I still want to read this article I saved in 2017?” or “should I still buy this loveseat that… oh, nevermind, it hasn’t been available since 2021.” 

The longer term projects will be combing through my Dropbox of thousands of photos - many of which are doubles - and perhaps the even bigger challenge, my Gmail account, where I have individual folders saving nearly every email I’ve sent or received since being invited to “try Google Mail” in 2006. Many of these emails will be worth saving, I imagine. I like going through old correspondence like old journals sometimes, or finding hidden gems of memories. But, that receipt for a dress I bought from Modcloth in 2008? The holiday e-card from a former colleague in 2011? They can probably go. 

I don’t think streamlining my digital archives will solve all of my problems, but it is certainly the first step for me to get past my current unrest. (I realize this crossroads is a uniquely “Millennial” problem, as our generation’s identifying trait is having had a pre-internet childhood and extremely tech-heavy adulthood. We were the last generation to have to learn what the internet even was, let alone how to use it.) 

After my April letter about wanting to disappear from the internet, I received a lot of responses to the tune of “OMG YES THIS!” So if you were one of those people, maybe a bit of digital decluttering is what you need too. At least for a start. Put all of it in front of you, hold it up, and ask yourself whether whatever it is you’re looking at still brings you joy, still has purpose, still deserves to take up space. Keep what matters. Archive what might. Delete what doesn’t. Control, alt, repeat.

FUN STUFF

What I'm Reading: The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

What I'm Watching: Taskmaster

What I'm Listening To: Florence + the Machine

What I'm Eating: Quinoa with roasted eggplant