We used to leave traces of our lives behind in fairly ordinary places.
Photographs in drawers.
Letters in boxes.
A notebook on a shelf.
A ticket from a memorable journey tucked into the back of a book.
Now we leave traces everywhere.
Old emails. Photos. Social media posts. Documents. Messages. Accounts we've forgotten about. Websites we created five years ago and haven't looked at since.
Our digital lives have become enormous.
And sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to look at somebody's entire digital existence as though it were an archaeological site.
What would you find?
A person they used to be.
A person they wanted to become.
Things they were excited about.
Things they had completely forgotten.
People who were once important.
Places they once lived.
And perhaps a few things they would rather nobody found.
The strange thing about digital life
The digital world has made some things wonderfully easy.
We can keep in touch with people who live thousands of miles away. We can store photographs without filling an entire cupboard. We can work from almost anywhere. We can learn almost anything.
But digital life also has a strange quality.
It doesn't always know when something is finished.
A physical chapter of your life might end quite naturally.
You move house.
You leave a job.
You finish school.
You go travelling and come home.
But online, everything can remain.
An old profile sits there.
A photograph stays visible.
An email account continues to exist.
A website carries on quietly in the background.
It's as if the past has forgotten to leave.
We are becoming our own archivists
I've started to think that part of living in the digital age is learning how to curate our own history.
Not obsessively.
Not by deleting everything that doesn't fit some perfect version of ourselves.
Quite the opposite.
Our old selves are part of the story.
But there is something useful about occasionally asking:
What do I actually want to keep?
What matters?
What can go?
What should be backed up?
What should be private?
What projects deserve to survive us?
And what things were simply useful for a particular moment and can now disappear?
These questions become even more interesting when you're creating something.
A course.
A business.
A blog.
A book.
A collection of photographs.
Suddenly your digital life isn't just somewhere you store things.
It's somewhere you build things.
Building rather than consuming
That distinction has become important to me.
The internet is incredibly good at encouraging us to consume.
Click.
Watch.
Scroll.
Read.
Repeat.
But there is another internet hiding underneath all of that — the internet as a workshop.
A place where you can make things.
Publish things.
Teach things.
Connect ideas.
Experiment.
Start again.
You don't need millions of followers for that to be worthwhile.
Sometimes building something that one person finds useful is enough.
Sometimes the thing you build today won't make sense until five years from now.
And sometimes it simply feels good to make something exist that didn't exist yesterday.
Perhaps that's one of the best things about digital life.
It has lowered the barrier between having an idea and doing something about it.
Of course, that means we have to choose what deserves our attention.
Because our attention is still finite, even if the internet isn't.
And that brings us to something that digital technology can't completely replace: the experience of actually being somewhere.