There is one thing that constantly falls out of conversation, it's about when everyone suddenly started throwing things away because 'it doesn't spark joy'? Marie Kondo was then the queen, and empty shelves and white walls were signs of good taste. And then suddenly an article appears in The Walrus titled 'More Is More: The End of Minimalism'. In that article, it is written how the pandemic turned everything upside down, people sitting for two years within four walls suddenly wanted to fill the space. Antiques, colorful pillows, homemade things, chaos that screams 'I am alive!'. It's easy to make a mistake here, but it's not just a trend. Simply put, there is some deep fatigue from the emptiness that has been imposed on us for years.
And now look at our phones and clouds. The same thing is happening there, only quieter and slower.
Once, Cal Newport in his book 'Digital Minimalism' convinced everyone to choose only what is truly important for you, delete everything unnecessary, and live with focus. And it sounded logical. Social networks suck up time, notifications annoy, it's better to keep 5–6 apps and no more. Many have tried. Some even succeeded. But then came the unlimited Google Photos (well, almost unlimited), iCloud for pennies, NAS at home for 200 bucks, and that's it. It became easier to store than to delete. Now this solution makes sense.
Why really suffer with choices when you can just throw in another 500 photos from your 2018 vacation? What if they'll be needed? What if that same funny conversation from 2020? What about the video of the cat that fell so amusingly back then? All of this now lives forever. And not only lives, but it also multiplies. AI on the phone generates new images, 8K videos eat gigabytes, messengers store chats with emojis and stickers for 10 years. And we are no longer curators of our digital lives. Everyone has become a collector.
The way to take control here plays the main role. Earlier, space was expensive, say a 1 TB hard drive was a luxury. You had to think about what to keep, what to erase. And now? The cloud is almost unlimited, prices fall every year. So why limit yourself? Taste changes precisely because of this. Earlier, value was in rarity: a good photo — the one you chose, edited, and kept out of a hundred. Now the value… well, it seems to be gone. Everything is available, everything is eternal, everything is 'just in case.' Here I don't want to delve deeper because that's a separate conversation.
And here begins the interesting part. If you take the physical world of maximalism, it's about personality: the room screams 'this is me' because it has a hundred little things with a story. In the digital world, it’s still more about laziness and the fear of losing. But gradually, aesthetics are appearing, and people are creating beautiful archives, sorting by years, making digital scrapbooks, editing videos from everything that has accumulated. This is no longer just hoarding. It’s an attempt to turn excess into something personal, alive.
There is just one nuance. When everything is stored and nothing is truly valued. You probably remember how in childhood one beautiful drawing could be a treasure for a month? And now there are 47 thousand photos in the gallery — and you just scroll through them because 'what if.' The feeling of rarity disappears. And along with it — that quiet joy of having truly chosen and kept something.
I might be wrong, but WALRUS here just timely pointed out the shift. In the real world, minimalism has declined because people got tired of being empty. In the digital realm, we can consider that the same thing might happen soon. We no longer want to be digital monks. We want to be… well, people. With a bunch of memories, even if half of them are already blurred and unnecessary.
The only question that constantly arises for me is whether we will learn to choose in this ocean of data? Or will we just drown in it with a smile, endlessly scrolling through old screenshots and telling ourselves 'I'll look at it someday'?
