Digital and Information Hoarding. It’s a Real Thing!
As we live our lives, we accumulate more and more stuff.
Nostalgia, emotions, and wistful desires prompt us to hold on to things that once brought us happiness or fulfilled us in some way, such as a deflated balloon from Rush’s Hold Your Fire tour. Here’s the thing, though, if we keep saving stuff, eventually it will become a burden. It takes energy to deal with stuff. It may not be troublesome to hold onto a deflated balloon as a memento from a special concert, but my collection of keepsakes expanded.
I believe that we can have a much happier life with less of everything.
Dawn from The Minimal Mom channel on YouTube gave each one of her family members a clear plastic box, all the same size, to store their special things. If it didn’t fit in the box, out it went. I did that too.
I also subscribe to Joshua Becker’s YouTube channel. He shares minimalist tips, too. A lesson I learned is that when we have too much stuff, we spend more time managing it than on the experiences it provides. I got what he meant because I spent more time tidying, organizing, and finding space for things than enjoying life with them.
So, I went on a roll getting rid of stuff. I wanted to simplify my life. Every week, I filled bags to either donate or toss. The stuff felt heavy around me and kept me stuck in a loop of cleaning and organizing, but I felt I was robbing myself of time to do the things I really wanted to do. I had to make tough decisions and only keep the things that matter the most.
Hoarding isn’t just for the physical things we can touch.
Hoarding comes in all shapes and sizes, and it can creep up on you disguised as a “collector” or justify itself by believing, “I’m going to need that one day.” I think we move into hoarding territory when we aren’t displaying or interacting with our collections, or when we find it stressful to store all the stuff we think we’ll need. Collecting something is meant to bring us joy. If it becomes a burden to handle, then it’s time to reconsider our desire for the object.
There is another kind of hoarding, digital hoarding, where we accumulate too many documents, information, videos, websites, photos, and music, anything we see or store on our computer or phone.
I’m going to be honest here and share that I’m an information and digital hoarder. I have addressed this issue and removed a significant amount of books, documents, emails, and saved websites, but I still have an excessive amount of saved content. There isn’t enough time to absorb or learn all the information I have saved, and it overwhelms me to think about it.
So why was I doing it?
Well, there is a phenomenon called FOMO (fear of missing out), and I suppose it could be that given my curious nature. I want to know all the answers, or find things interesting, and want to save them for a later date. However, I kept accumulating information to one day be able to read the books, emails, website information, or documents, or whatever digital files I saw that piqued my interest. I was overwhelmed by information, and day after day, I wasn’t productive. I got sidetracked by all the digital stuff. Even though my desk was clear, my computer was not. I was making my life harder than it had to be.
Fate stepped in and caught my attention when my hard drive failed, and I lost a ton of photos, files, software, and more. Thankfully, I saved my most important files on external devices, but I didn’t take the time to back up my photos (because there were too many of them!) Most of us have lots of photos and screenshots stored on our phones and computers. Oh, that’s a pretty flower – snap three photos. Oh, I like that meme – save. When we’re on vacation, we take tons of photos to remember it, but do we take the time afterward to look at them? Are we fully present, enjoying our vacation, or more fixated on capturing a perfect photo? And those photos add up!
To simplify our lives with our digital footprint, we need to have remarkable discipline nowadays.
It is so easy to get sucked in to an existence that we never planned for but just lost two hours scrolling social media, the Internet, YouTube, or TikTok. Life around us ceased to exist while we were locked onto a screen.
I hope I’m wrong, but I am concerned that this digital hoarding/addiction is only going to get worse and control more and more of our humanity. I mean, toddlers and up are fixated on a screen instead of interacting with people. We’re allowing ourselves to be encumbered by a screen. Is that what we want? I say I don’t want that, but it’s so easy to get sucked in!
Overcoming digital hoarding:
- Give yourself a time limit on social media and do not allow it to come before interacting with a person.
- If you find information on a website that you want to access later, or an online store, take the time to create bookmark folders in your search engine to be able to find the information easily and be able to delete them if you no longer need that information. Just be selective about what you save. It can add up quickly!
Create bookmarks and folders in search engines.
Bookmark, edit, and create folders for webpages using Google Chrome.
Bookmark webpages in Microsoft Edge.
Bookmark a webpage using Mozilla Firefox.
Bookmark a webpage on an iPhone using Safari.
- Set times you can “play” online that won’t interfere with your job, relationships, etc. Give yourself a realistic amount of time. For instance, I will spend 30 minutes on Facebook in the morning while having my coffee.
- Go through your photos on your phone or computer once a week when you can allot at least 30 minutes to sort through, put in folders, share, or delete.
- When you search for information, be mindful that overload causes too much unnecessary stress. Find what you’re looking for and move on. Try not to let yourself get sidetracked. It’s so easy to do! I was looking to see if an actor was still alive and went from one website to another till I wound up looking at the Met Gala photos! Amazing how sneaky searching can take over my time. Time no one can get back.
- If you’re a curious person like I am, it can be challenging to rein ourselves in with saving information on our computers. My tip is to force myself to review the information I’ve accumulated at least once a month and eliminate items I’ve never revisited. It has to be that way or else I’ll be weighed down with too much digital stuff.
- Give yourself grace, but not too much. We must be vigilant, or we’ll succumb to the ease of scrolling or digital saving. It was designed to encourage us to spend more time on it.
Let’s not allow our lives to be controlled by a device, machine, or things. Our lives are far too valuable and important. We’re responsible for being good people, showing others what it means to be good people, and teaching our children how to be good. We were born to live, not to exist.
Thank you for reading this, and I hope I offered something of value to make our lives better.
To taking back our lives,
Francesca
Written by a human.
© 2025 FrancescaME. All rights reserved.
