The Clutter in my Virtual Attic

It was time to replace the laptop.  I looked at my nine year old Dell like one might look at an old and ailing pet. I knew the end was near for my old friend.  Surfing the web on the prehistoric monster was like watching paint dry.  I'd often punch in the URL and then go cook dinner or build something, checking occasionally to see if the site had loaded.  No one could say I didn't use things until they owed me nothing.

Time for a family meeting.  Today's topic: Replacing our outdated tech with more efficient devices while keeping our simplification goals in mind.

If there's one thing that advancing technology has provided, it is the ability to do things with smaller, more efficient devices.  Part of our simplifying goal is to get rid of (or avoid) single use gadgets.  If we can replace three items (economically) with one, we give it serious consideration.  This concept is like candy to an electronics loving sugar hound.  I inherited my love of the newest beeping, flashing gizmos from my dad who surprisingly, despite nearing 70 is the go-to guy in the family when anyone is thinking about a purchase that involves a battery or something wireless.  I'd bet money that if we dropped my long deceased grandfather into the 21st century, we'd discover that he had the same affliction.

Despite my disdain for frivolous consumerism, I've been known to be a complete hypocrite when a new electronic gadget is involved.  At least I'm not impulsive.  I typically won't buy anything without exhaustive research and deliberation beforehand.  There are plenty of very chic devices out there, but I'm not convinced that they all have practical value.  Some seem destined to be quickly outdated (relatively speaking, since everything is quickly outdated nowadays) or are simply too expensive for what they do.

With the laptop decision looming, it was time to get my mind into gear.  How could we scale back and sell multiple items which we could then replace with one item.  As I pondered the possibilities in my office, I took note of the train wreck on my desk.  I had a full size desktop with a gigantic flat panel monitor.  A twisted, spaghetti-like mass of cables snaked about in front of me.  Did I need all of this?  Did my monitor need to be so huge?  (I only ended up with it because....it was at one of our auctions.)  Could a new laptop replace all of this volume and perform the same, if not better functions?  The desktop wasn't old, so I could probably sell it and offset much of the cost of the new laptop.  Time to get dad on the phone.

After multiple conversations about processor speeds and hard drive capacities, it was decided that the desktop should go.  With that decision made, I turned to scrutinize the other devices in our home.  We had an old video game system that could be sold since our daughter now had a late generation iPod that played hundreds of games.  Likewise with the portable DVD player since she could also play video on her cassette -sized device.  Now we were getting somewhere.  We were going to ditch the desktop, the older laptop, the portable DVD player and the game system.  Incoming would be one newer laptop.  A huge net gain in simplicity.  What I didn't realize is that I'd have to go through a whole new purging process to make all of this happen.  I'm not talking about the physical items that we were parting with.  That was easy.  More difficult was that  I now had to deal with all the data on my desktop computer.

Although my desktop was only a couple of years old, when I bought it I had the computer tech transfer my old files from my clunker over to the new system.  I never gave a second thought to what might have accumulated in that dark closet known as the the hard drive.  With this decision to downsize, I felt it might be time to sift through the data accumulation and ready the recycle bin.  I had no idea what I was in for.

It turns out that I had some sort of parallel life on my hard drive.  A life that looks like a hoarders house, only in cyberspace.  That life takes up no physical room so it's easy to overlook it during the simplification process, but man.....it was there.  Years and years of accumulated data, documents, saved webpages, bookmarks, photos...you name it.  I had just climbed into one of those attics that fills me with dread every time I poke my head into the scuttle and see the piles and piles of junk.  My own virtual attic from hell.  I needed to fuel up for this one.

After a good hearty dinner, I plopped myself down in front of my over sized monitor and clicked "Explore."  It was a mess.  Random files and folders everywhere, hundreds and hundreds of documents from years gone by.  Folders in folders inside more folders.  I needed a glass of wine. 

To look at every file and make a decision would take a lifetime, so I decided on a rule that works in our physical household...With the obvious exception of family pictures, if it is more than a year old and hasn't been utilized, it goes.  Great thing about computers today....all you do is mouse over the file and it tells you when it was last opened.  Turns out I had crap in there that was 7, 8 even 9 years old.  I practically wore out the delete button in four hours.  In many cases, entire overstuffed folders were ditched.  Nearly half my hard drive ended up in the recycle bin.  Old business letters, recipes we sent to friends, screen shots of long defunct websites, photos of items we posted on eBay...all into the virtual dumpster.  It was almost as good as sex.  Almost.

NOW....I'm ready for the new laptop.  What I discovered is that clutter in our lives can extend well beyond the physical items, but into the virtual world and from there into the psychological world.  Starting with the physical items will naturally lead us through the other layers that are not so obvious.  The desired result being that we eventually free ourselves from the clutter in our minds.

This is what my hard drive looked like.