A couple of weeks ago I lost my phone on a fairly easy night out, seemingly vanishing out of thin air. Instinctively reaching for my pocket upon getting home, and before turning the room upside down – I gave up pretty quick, almost wanting to accept the loss just so I could start the process of moving on immediately. Which is something I think I’m getting quite good at. Even now, with countless photos lost, (significant ones of my sisters that I’ll never be able to see again) or all the poetry that I’ve written over the past 5 or so years, I think I’m happier knowing that the baggage of all those files and megabytes are things that I don’t have to carry around anymore.

We consider there to be an ease in which we’re able to store our important information now, but all that information ends up in one object. An object with a value that is unmatched to the invaluable information on it. My phone was probably taken and wiped within the first 24 hours for a quick buck, while I would have never sold anything on it – for any amount of money. Something which probably further justifies my own attempts at moving on so quickly, because the whole thing is a bit of a joke.

We’re all doomed to fill our galleries endlessly with memories, sitting within the widest range of significance and insignificance, all blending together in a single space – subconsciously devaluing these moments that mean so much to us. It’s all a byproduct of being in the age of ease. We operate within routine, and that routine is driven by an ease provided through the design of these devices. So even if I wanted to start deleting photos that I don’t need on a weekly basis, the way that every other app spoon-feeds me content, and tells me what I want to see, means that I’m more likely to hand over the responsibility of management back to the people who know “best.”

That’s why physical media is so great, because its importance takes up a physical space, and means that we have to decide what we need to keep in order to combat feeling like a hoarder. There’s no real space management needed on your phone until you get an alert that your storage is just about full – because these services would rather try their hand at getting you to subscribe to some kind of cloud package in a moment of overflowing desperation.

It’s almost sickening to just think about the tons and tons and megatons of digital files being uploaded to online storage everyday. It’s overwhelming, but it’s easy. I’ve probably spent 3 years considering taking photos on film, still having not done it yet – because I would have to go find and compare cameras, putting aside time getting something that I basically already own – and even if I did own it, how long would it take me to get those photos developed and restart the process of purchasing film again? Probably too long, but I know it would at least make me cherish the things I capture in a new light.

Even with my lost poetry, random notes, and the list of birthday dates that are going to leave me in some unfortunate situations going forward – I don’t know why I assumed I would never lose them. I’m not even so sure why I opted to keep all that stuff on my phone anyway. Part of me feels like I might’ve just wanted to write stuff without seeing and thinking about my own handwriting. Which isn’t bad, it just makes me think about myself. Maybe phones help you to store the things you care about in a way that doesn’t remind you of your own intricacies – because it’s easier like that, and I don’t have to stop and think about how weirdly I write the letter “t” every time.

By far the best and initially most stressful thing after losing your phone, is the brief moment when you’re unreachable. I make it a priority to contact the 1 or 2 people that are closest to me, and then I lag for about a week or 2 before I round up the rest of the gang – because I know this excuse can’t last forever, but being unreachable always feels so good – and if I’ve noticed anything about how the cellphone carved its way into our societal hip, it’s through feeding the parental paranoia of unreachability. Something that I think goes a bit unnoticed in the grand scheme of the phone’s negative social effects.

If you are a parent, or can imagine yourself being a parent one day, it’s without a doubt that you would naturally want to hold off from tormenting your kids attention spans and their innocence for as long as possible – but you can’t deny the element of safety that a phone provides – maybe you will guard some of the sites that they use and certain apps, but they will naturally take to the camera through curiosity and start the endless hoard of memories made in some of the earliest moments of their life, memories they’ll have to try and carry around forever in a digital space – and so it goes.

I think ultimately we’re at war with this ease, and things will only go in the direction of being made easier. At this point, nobody is going to spend more money for a device that makes management and entertainment less automated. Automation is the future, but there’s just no way it’s gonna be a positive one. The work we put into storing our memories, notes, and contacts, reminds us to value these very vital things – and the things we don’t work for and put aside time for come at a natural loss of value, slowly but surely. I didn’t think to backup my photos and poetry, because they had lost their value to me without me realizing it.

It was so easy to take those photos and jot that text down in an instant – there’s no work involved, and there will never be work involved when we store our importance on competing products. So I’d like to start taking up more space in the physical world with the things I care about, and treat the digital side of things as if it could be taken away at any moment – because it can – and even if you kept it, it’s just sitting on a dying product that is always going to be scrambling to keep its users lives and memories connected to their brand, in a long-term attempt to feed the fear of holding onto an endlessly expanding scroll of digital files – sounds like fun to me !