- Research identifies digital hoarding as a subtype of hoarding disorder, affecting mental health.
- Digital hoarding is linked to anxiety, causing stress and disorganization.
- Accumulation of digital photos and videos over the years has caused me severe stress.
“No way, I’d completely forgotten about this video! I’m so glad you held on to it for so many years!”
I used to love hearing my friends tell me any variation of this sentence. It was a glowing affirmation that holding on to my 6TB iCloud storage plan was the right move.
For years I’d taken it upon myself to be the group historian, to record the small moments at every event.
Then one day, I found myself curled up sobbing on the floor after being locked out of my 867 GB-strong Google Photos app.
Surely that was an extreme reaction, my friends said” “They’re just pictures. Wait, you said how many GB?!”
I looked it up, and their concern was warranted. It turns out, I may be a digital hoarder.
What is digital hoarding?
Digital hoarding was first introduced as a potential subtype of hoarding disorder in 2015 after a case report in the British Medical Journal described a man who took thousands of pictures a week and showed reluctance to discard any of them.
The paper described digital hoarding as the “accumulation of digital files to the point of loss of perspective, which eventually results in stress and disorganization.”
Although hoarding disorder has been documented as a mental illness in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, there has been very little research done on the digital aspect of it, save testimonials on the internet.
In a 2022 study with 846 participants, Darshana Sedera, assistant Dean at Southern Cross University, found that there was a definite link between digital hoarding and anxiety.
Nick Neave, director of the Hoarding Research Group, told me it was a sort of chicken-and-egg situation.
“A person whose levels of anxiety are slightly higher anyway tends to be driven toward digital hoarding and then tends to be more anxious when things start to unravel,” said Neave.
“You want to take a very good picture, but you’re anxious that you take the wrong picture or that you would delete that picture by mistake, so that you take many more pictures.”
“Then you get even more anxious because you start to worry about storage, you start to worry about the cost, and oh no, what happens if all of those pictures get deleted?” he continued.
The signs were all there
He said that even though there’s no formal diagnosis, I “ticked all the boxes” for being a digital hoarder.
When I looked back, the signs were all there. A screenshots folder filled to the brim with chat snippets from a decade ago, multiple Instagram accounts I created to upload my memories onto in case my Google Drive storage ran out, hundreds of GB worth of video call screen recordings I never once watched again.
The worst part is the accumulation over the years means that it will take me a long, long time to sit and delete the things I don’t want anymore — and that doesn’t just apply to photos and videos.
The internet seems bent on building up digital assets on my online presence with every minute.
Do you want to make cute compilation videos about the trip you just went on? Better be ready with about 50 different clips and 20-ish backup ones to be safe.
Instagram and TikTok let you post at least 20 pictures on one single carousel post now.
My bills all come online, which means I download the PDFs but also take screenshots because what if I can’t find the PDF when I need it? My inbox is full of spam, but I can’t hit “delete all” because what if there were useful promo codes in there, or my flight tickets went to the wrong folder and accidentally got deleted?
What’s the alternative? Sift through hundreds of emails to find the three useful ones and delete the rest? Best to hold on to all of it, I told myself, ignoring the red notice that I’ve used up 96% of my storage.
Unpacking why exactly I can’t part with my towering stash is probably best addressed through multiple therapy sessions, but my digital hoarding tendencies definitely have something to do with an underlying fear of forgetting and being forgotten.
How it all started
I know it started from a good place. Every time I saw a picture of little Hannah or heard my brother’s voice before its current cracked adult iteration, I would smile and be infinitely glad I saved it.
Every time I chanced across a conversation from my teenage Google Hangouts phase, I sent it to my friends and we laughed about who we used to be and how far we’ve come.
I’m not sure when exactly it intensified into the obsession that it became, one that sent me into a weeklong spiral when I realized Instagram story archives from five years ago had irreversibly turned all my videos into static frames.
It genuinely felt like chunks of my memory were gone forever.
And what of the way forward? “Our possessions determine our self,” Neave told me. ”It all tells a story about you; it’s much more normal to be a hoarder than it is to be a minimalist, because hoarding is part of our human nature.”
“The onus is largely and squarely on the online storage providers to provide us with indexing,” said Darshana Sedera, adding that it would help with categorizing digital assets and make it easier to decide which ones to let go of.
He also said that setting aside time regularly to declutter your digital life is crucial to minimizing buildup.
Down the minimalist decluttering rabbit hole I go then. Hopefully, I come out the other side with a happier headline and several TBs lighter.
