Dropbox is raising their prices, as is seemingly every other digital service of late. So I’ve been scaling back where I can. Dropped Netflix and Hulu down a level, canceled a few subscriptions here and there. There’s an intentional inertia to these services (eels, John calls them) that makes them hard to shake. If I get rid of Dropbox I have to rejigger how 1Password works, for starters, and I can’t even remember what all other services I have syncing through it. What will break if I stop using this? Do I even feel like figuring that out? It’s exactly the kind of annoying project I hate taking on, but if I don’t take it on, the procrastination gets rubbed in my face every month to the tune of $11.99 + tax.
And that’s just the practical inertia. There’s also the sort of emotional intertia that explains why I still have unopened boxes in my closet that have been with me in three different homes now. The mental energy one needs to go through old shit, to actually look at it and process it, is not an energy I tend to have in abundance. That infinite closet of cloud storage means we can pile all kinds of shit in there. You don’t even have to stack it if you don’t want to! The shelves go on and on and on. A rummage sale of remnants of your own digital life.
But I am trying to shake it, trying to have less, even digitally. It got dark fast earlier today (the today of when I wrote this); a storm rolling in. I found I was able to redirect energy I’d thought to use on a run to finally start cleaning up Dropbox, the biggest of my infinite closets. Abandoned projects, abandoned blog posts, photos of when I was fat, or sad, or fat and sad, or with people I don’t get along with anymore, or that I regret losing touch with. And good things, too, of course; things I’m proud to have written and made and had completely forgotten about … and hey, all of my hoarded pug photos are now in one place. More of a timesaver than you’d imagine.
It’s weirdly emotional work, just tapping away at my arrow keys, hitting command+delete on every third item or so. But it’s healing in a way. Digital or analog, it feels nice to unburden, to put things in the trash. It wasn’t taking up space, but it had weight. Feeling lighter already.