I’m going through my personal document archive right now. I have data stretching back to 2007, though most of it clusters around 2009+ which when I started getting “serious” about hoarding data, documents and other bits of intellectual flair about myself. What started off as a simple Spring Cleaning-type exercise in tidying up my digital filing system is instead turning into a philosophical journey to a land of the past self and it’s inviting a lot of questions and thoughts I wasn’t expecting to have, such as…
I’ve got A LOT of information I collected at various times I was attempting to self-educate on topics of interest. For example, I have enough reading material to teach and supply a graduate level course on investing and financial analysis, business management and strategy and basic accounting and corporate finance. I also have collected digital copies of nearly every book and article I’ve read on economics and related sociology and historical topics. It’s essentially a download of my brain on these topics and, given that I feel comfortable with my level of knowledge in these areas, I’ve done a lot of the hard work in gathering up a comprehensive curriculum here which might be of use to a future learner, such as my child.
But will my child want to study these things? Will my Little Lion need to do the kind of painstaking scouring of primary materials, in volume, that I did? Or will my Little Lion learn a lot of the fundamentals by a kind of osmosis being around me, talking about this stuff with me, such that it won’t really be much use to have the archive for personal perusal?
Now that I am done with these materials, they have little value to me personally. It’s nice to imagine I’d dig in here and there for reference or to double-check something, but I haven’t touched this stuff since 2012 when I began collecting it. That’s 5 years! I knew I had it all this time, but I never went looking for it. What are the chances I will look back on it another 5 years from now? Or 20?
I try to live a simple life. I’m not a minimalist in practice, but the people around me would accuse me of such. I am tempted to just delete this stuff wholesale.
When I think about transmitting my book learning to my kin, and I think about the principles of selectivity and simplicity, there are few titles I would like to hand down and say “Read this if you want to be part of the family/have success in your life/grow your mind.” A book like Human Action comes to mind. That’s as close to Required Reading on each of those points as anything I can think of. But a PDF copy of “Investment Topic X”? Or “Economic Subject Y”? I don’t think it is essential to have that all lined up for the next in line.
The modern trend of Big Data promises amazing returns to collecting and analyzing comprehensive data about people’s interests, behaviors, etc. Mostly, it is a false promise in my experience and I think it’s a false promise in looking through my archive as well. Here’s some notes I took in 2010 on some subject. Here is a spreadsheet I built for something in 2011. Here is some list of experiences I wanted to have, or goals I was chasing after. It is the story of my life, the breadcrumbs along the path to whatever my final purpose and meaning is. (It’s amazing how you seem to get an idea in your head early on in your life and just iterate it over and over. I wonder where those ideas come from and why we get fascinated with them?) But what of it? Can’t rehash that part of my life and choose differently, and I am where I am, and it doesn’t offer much predictive value for where I am going unless it is to continue on the path I am on, but then it is inevitable so, again, what of it?
I think about this with my email archiving as well. I have a lot of emails stored up over the year. Conversations on all kinds of topics. Lengthy diatribes about what I think and why. A veritable mind map on a plethora of issues. It’s fun to be able to look back on it from time to time. But really, it is of more value to Google in selling my (anonymized?) data to advertisers than it will ever be to me in providing some kind of meaningful insight or prediction about myself. Mostly it is good for looking up old logins, loyalty program info, or upcoming event or itinerary data. After that, it is the past, and it doesn’t matter.
I have all these photos, too. Ever since I had a web-connected phone, they just started accumulating. A snap here, a photo there. How many have I looked back on even a week or two after I took it? The significance fades, even if the memory is still there. One day I could share with a friend who wants to know about a place I’ve been or an experience I’ve had, or with my Little Lion, to illustrate what life was like before I was a parent. Why? Why does this matter? It is gone. It can’t be gotten back to. What can it tell us? Little, I think.
So, a new habit to inculcate: create a robust, dynamic filing structure for recalling and accessing current data and records of interest, and then have the discipline to purge when these files go “inactive” in my consciousness.
A House Rises 