Before I Clear My Drive

Confessions of a graduating digital hoarder.

By Erica Lee 

Illustration by Kathleen Halley-Segal

My google drive is color coded, with the spring months in shades of green, fall months in yellow and orange hues, and one miscellaneous folder in mountain gray. That’s nine folders in total, 23.34 gigabytes carrying the weight of my college career. With my impending graduation, I am confronted with a question all seniors must answer: what will I do when CUIT reduces my Google Drive storage to five gigabytes?

My drive has become a natural extension of my own mind, a natural repository for all my academic, professional, and even personal work. Every last-minute homework assignment, final presentation, and draft cover letter that I’ve created lives in my digital filing cabinet, waiting to be read or watched or enjoyed one more time after their deadline. Meanwhile my shitty first paper outlines, unreadable notes, downloaded papers, sample datasets, and “Untitled Document” files became obsolete after their first use. 

In my rational brain, I know that over half of my drive is junk that I will never need. Yet somehow I can’t bear to part with these digital artifacts. It’s not that I haven’t encountered this issue before—we all remember high school. I felt confident trashing my physical notebooks and print copies, but I downloaded every last file to the cloud (whatever that means) and haven’t touched one since. Still I needed an answer, and about a week ago, I tried to look for one. 

Racking my mind for an explanation, I supposed that I was just a chronic worrier that I might need something in the future or a sentimental girl who sees each letter as an expression of a fingertap. The internet, however, diagnosed me as a digital hoarder. According to the Google AI summary, digital hoarding is “the excessive accumulation of digital files—photos, emails, documents—to the point of losing perspective, leading to stress, disorganization, and decreased productivity.” With a bit more clicking around, I learned that the term was only coined in 2015 by a group of Dutch psychiatrists. 

For such a clinical term, I needed to know if I was singularly infected or if my friends were ill, too. Over the phone, I learned that one of my high school friends barbecued their notes on the last day of school, but they opened five different google accounts to hold all of their images. In Ferris, another friend told me that they are paying $10/month in digital rent for a terabyte of data to store old dance videos. Other subjects were interviewed, but they barely answered, more shocked by the fact that Columbia would dare reduce our LionMail data. Though I found solace in solidarity, what I really wanted was answers. Why did we care? 

If none of these things mattered, then why did we make them? Was the time I spent e-filing worth it if I have nothing to show? Is anything worth anything if it is not built to be consumed by another? Was it all just a practice for the real world? Was any of this worth it at all? 

The more I thought about it, the worse I felt but the clearer my head became. My internal battle with the delete key might be a bit silly, but it wasn’t ridiculous. Other than my diploma and transcript, there really was nothing to show at the end of it all, no final product that would mean anything to anyone. But did I have to let that matter? My work is proof, not that the work was good or even useful, but proof that it happened at all. The late nights, stress, and hours of pondering actually produced something tangible, even if only temporarily.

I know I’ll have to clear the space eventually. Five gigabytes isn’t enough to hold four years of anything. But for now, I’m letting it sit, all 23.34 gigabytes of half-formed thoughts and finished assignments. Not because I need them, but because I’m not ready to say that I don’t.