no reading lists in the afterlife

hoarding digital clutter on behalf of the future, idealised version of yourself

I still haven’t memorised all the words on my lists. I keep a list for everything: words I want to learn the meanings of without having to keep looking them up, like specious (superficially plausible, but actually wrong) and prevaricating (to beat around the bush); French words and their translations; simple words I already know the meaning of but note down anyway because of their subtle power to transform ordinary speech into something more lyrical: enclosed, upstream, composition.

Amongst these are also job applications (sent and subsequently rejected); recommended cafes in cities I have no time or money to visit; breads from the Lidl bakery that are free from emulsifiers and mono-triglycerides; every moment that provoked déjà vu; books I still need to read (Pride and Prejudice); films I still need to watch (The Matrix).

I have a list of every beautiful passage that momentarily took me away from myself and closer to The Source of Everything. I have a list of my favourite albums in case somebody asks, to save me from stuttering and thinking about it too much. I have a list of articles to come back to and look at later. I have a list of listless things to be sorted into lists one day.

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My parents were kinda hoarders. Still kinda are. One time I came home from school and a pinball machine had been pressed up against the living room wall. There was nowhere to move. It didn’t help that the house existed permanently in an in-between state: things were only ever half-done because something else always demanded attention – you only had to start peeling the bathroom wallpaper before it was suddenly dinner time. And then by morning there was all that living to take care of: running to the school gates; aunties and uncles to speak to on the phone; the familiar, bewitching glow of the television. And so that’s how it goes, you have to forget about it and do something else because life always asks more from you.

When I was thirteen I invited a boy to my house for the first time and we kissed the way most thirteen year olds do: all tongue, all limbs searching. Later when I broke up with him because I was bored, he told me to fuck off and go back to my ‘poor house.’ I omitted this detail when I told my Mum what happened. I stretched across the chipped kitchen counter and poured a glass of water into a jar that was once used for chocolate spread. It was a tiring way to live. But we were never not loved.

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You can turn out one of two ways after growing up in an environment like that, but there’s no way of knowing which way until much later on. When my brother moved into his own room he kept only what was absolutely necessary: bed, computer, no more than two pairs of jeans and a few books. He is a serious and devout minimalist, foregoing the decorative in favour of the functional. I, on the other hand, own far too many trinkets for someone who lives in a bedsit which takes me four steps to walk the entirety of. Each corner is crammed with started-but-not-finished novels and thick scrapbooks that barely close, the pages swollen with faded receipts and used ice-cream wrappers from summers long ago. It’s as though a memory isn’t made real until taped down to a page.

That farewell by the port only happened insofar as I could prove it. I remember the long, aching wail of the ship’s horn to announce its departure and how it sounded almost human. I know we stood beneath that needle of midday light piercing straight through us – we had to choose our words carefully because the heat made syllables heavy and metallic in the mouth. You might not believe me, but look, here’s my stamp.

‘When one has once had the good luck to love life intensely, life is spent trying to recapture that ardour and that illumination’ - Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.

But I don’t just hoard things to have access to the past, I hoard things because they are also portals to a future self. Everything currently tucked away within my Notion dashboard, my screenshots album and the notes app all point towards a desired reality, towards a self who has finally read all of those books and memorised all those words in different languages.

“Digital hoarders may collect emails, photos, articles, podcasts, or any type of computer files they believe they may want to revisit in the future, In most cases, they rarely get to actually use it or listen to it or read it.

The act of saving the file becomes an uncontrollable urge. “It means that they’ve lost the choice — they feel they have to save it. If they do not, they may feel uncomfortable and, more often than not, anxious that they may need to have access to the information and it’s not going to be there,” Dr. Maidenberg says.

The issue seems to be rooted in a belief that my idealised self is out there, if I could only follow the right directions to reach her. The lists serve as a nod to ‘one day’, to a delayed version of myself who – as a result of the lists – is better than I am. She is well-read and cultured and wise and therefore worthy at long last. The files on her laptop are finally clean, scrubbed until everything is in its right place and only a few, tidy blue folders remain. She has completed her work. There is no-one to answer to. Nothing left to do and nobody else to be except herself.

But the lists keep getting longer. There is so much of everything; it’s enough to make you not want to do anything at all.

‘His misfortune is that he has come to the world too soon and is therefore constantly arriving too late’ - Kierkegaard, Either/Or

I often think about Haley Nahman’s piece on the quantifiable self in which she describes our desire to condense our lives into something measurable:

There is something fundamentally fearful about our desire to quantify our lives—art consumed, habits codified—as if we can stave off death by measuring its antecedent in infinitely smaller units. It takes a certain trust to move forward without proof, but unfortunately we outsourced that a long time ago, and it’s hard to imagine turning back now.

The fact that I saved this in a folder called ‘deconstructing the digital’ says it all.

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Research has shown that people perceive their ‘self’ as extending to their digital possessions and are becoming increasingly attached to them (Cushing, 2013). Really, that is all it comes down to: attachment. We try to possess what we fear losing. And with each passing day we lose another hour of white sky, teaspoon of milk, the bone clicking sensation after stretching. Each bookmark for later is a resistance of my own mortality.

To forget, to leave nothing behind, would mean to accept that life is not long enough and ‘finished’ is a fallacy. Saving nothing is to surrender once and for all to that big, unknowable aether.

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All week I’ve been desperately trying to declutter my digital space before the New Year rings in. I sit motionless for hours on my Mum’s sofa bed, eyes moving frantically scanning the images as I parse through screenshots of recommended books and songs heard in coffee shops and quotes that made me want to change my life, sorting them into folders before clicking delete delete delete. I try to make sense of whether a PDF about how to design a website belongs in curiosities cabinet or brain bin.

Part of me fears that all this clacking on keyboards is nothing more than a ruse to further delay the real, embodied work that meaningful change requires of us. But when I slow down and question the motions of what gradually feels like a Sisyphean task, an echo from the future instructs me to keep going: it’s me one year from now, she’s waiting on the other side.

And so I continue pushing the weight of my swollen hard drive up and up and up, I move pixels from one crowded file to another, I reach beyond the confines of myself and into the always-alive screen, searching for a vessel that could contain fragments of this short life forever. I make lists and notes and save bookmarks and create Watch Later playlists and attempt to tidy them in order to make space for more. I annotate the margins of my reading lists to guide my future self: START HERE. READ THIS. READ THIS LATER. COME BACK TO THIS. In other words, THIS IS YOUR SALVATION.

I struggle to part with anything which might come in useful later. Since I don’t know what later has in store, I make notes of everything – just in case.

I keep, therefore I am.

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Cornbread, front porch, upstate. At first glance these are banal words, pointing only to the thing they mean and nothing more. But I keep them written down because they remind me of old American films where it always snows on time. When I read these words I imagine myself in a flat suburban neighbourhood with short grass and white picket fences, nobody around except the postman whistling.

Cornbread, front porch, upstate. I wonder if I repeated them aloud like an incantation (checks list: a series of words said as a magic spell or charm) whether my future self would wake from a deep slumber and glance over my shoulder at everything I’ve been saving for her. The Society of the Spectacle. Simple Passions. A Clockwork Orange. Roman Holiday. Articles on parasocial relationships and digital identities. Articles on walking. Pictures of the largest living tree in the world (the General Sherman Tree in California). Duran Duran’s entire discography. Homemade gift tutorials to save for friends birthday’s. Healthy brownie recipes that only ask for pitted dates, cocoa powder, peanut butter and one sweet potato. A podcast episode about public toilets. Ideas for future projects: articles to write, short films to make. Big books and small books and all the worlds in-between the words.

She’d probably say: I’m not doing all that. I’m going for a walk.

/

When the new year rings in, I’ll try hard not to be anywhere else other than here, not to think of all the digital clutter that still needs sorting.

But I can’t pretend I won’t be thinking about what else is just waiting to be found, whether one more scroll would give me what I finally need to become myself, which is to say, the kind of person who creates the kind of days worth sticking inside a scrapbook.

I’ve been patiently preparing for myself my whole life. I’m not sure I can wait another year.

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HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!! I hope this year gives you what you need, even if that isn’t always at first glance what you want; I became much happier when I understood the difference.

I haven’t written any resolutions this year. I don’t want to spend more time planning. I know what I need to do – I just need to do it! (IGNORES BLARING EXECUTIVE DYSFUNCTION)

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P.S. RIP mindless musings! 2021-2024. I’ve wanted to change this blog title for a while now but nothing ever fit. In fact, talking of lists, I have a huge one containing every single adjective and noun pairing I could think of to try and come up with a new title. Nothing worked until finally – just in time for the New Year – one felt more right than the others: LONG DISTANCE SEASHELL.

I’ve been thinking about intuition a lot over the past year: how to listen to it, how to discern it from desire. There were a few times last winter when I took the train to Weston-super-Mare in an attempt to see if the tides could help to abate my weary sense self and gnawing despair about the world. Despite the coastal wind lashing at my face, I’d walk the length of the shore picking seashells up with my wet gloves and putting them in my pocket. When I got home and held them next to my ear, I felt the edges of myself soften. The occlusion effect from the seashell gave me a sense of clarity that no amount of talking could have provided. And so when I think about seashells, I think about quiet, about intuition, about how we are always in dialogue with nature. We just have to listen before we reply.

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P.P.S. If one of your new year resolutions is to spend less time on your phone, why not make a pledge to the anti-rot manifesto by purchasing a poster? After every night wasted scrolling, I grew more and more frustrated with my inability to remind myself in the middle of the fevered scrolling that this was NOT HOW I WANTED TO SPEND MY TIME! I needed something tangible to serve as an anchor of sorts. And so the anti-rot manifesto poster was born! You can use the promo code NYE2025 to get 10% off your purchase.

:)

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