Passive Memories and Storage

I have just over 20,000 photos on my phone, and I know people who have even more. Some of my friends even teased me for having “so few,” but to me, that feels overwhelming. Most of them were taken after I turned 16, when I started living with my phone camera in my pocket at all times. It’s an overwhelming number, and honestly, I don’t need that many. But I also can’t bring myself to delete them.

This is the paradox of living with technology: we have infinite access to memory, but that memory is defined as much by what we keep as by what we delete. My phone overflows with screenshots I have no recollection of taking — half-conversations, snippets of texts, notes to myself that don’t make sense anymore when I look back on them months or years later. I’ve saved blurry shots of sunsets at the beach that I swore looked perfect at the time, random corners of the street in my hometown with the coffee shops, restaurants, and random stores that felt “aesthetic” (but definitely aren’t), and hundreds, maybe even thousands, of bad pictures of myself and my friends. Although these pictures contaminate my phone, I also have really good ones. They’re certainly not all good photos, in the sense of being beautiful or well-composed, but they’re good to me because they’re personal — because I can remember the moment behind them. Even the worst ones feel like proof that something happened, that we were there.

Some of them are tied to specific memories. A screenshot of a text where my friend told me a funny name for a character I made in “Sims 4” that I no longer need or even have the space for. A picture of someone’s cat hanging out next to me that looks almost identical to 10 other ones I’ve taken. A blurry shot from a concert where you can’t even tell who’s performing, but I keep it because it reminds me that I was there, even if the photo doesn’t fully show it.

And yet, when I stop to think about it, what are all these photos really doing for me? I rarely scroll back through them unless I want to show someone how ridiculous I was as an early teenager or share some lore from my life. The sheer volume means that the really special ones — the kind I actually want to see again — get buried. As of recently, my phone physically cannot even back up any more photos, as if the cloud itself is trying to tell me I’ve gone too far.

Scrolling endlessly, snapping photos mid-conversation, and recording videos at the slightest provocation trains the mind to flit from one stimulus to the next. Attention becomes a scarce resource, spread thin across thousands of images I barely remember taking. And I need my attention. 

Further, sometimes I imagine what would happen if I lost all of them — if my phone broke and my storage was wiped clean. The thought terrifies me, and yet part of me wonders if it would also be freeing. Without the clutter, would I actually remember things more vividly? Would the absence of thousands of screenshots, photos, and videos force me to hold onto the moments that matter in my mind, instead of outsourcing that work to my phone?

At some point, the archive stops working like memory and starts working like noise. It’s not just that the special photos get buried: It’s that the entire collection becomes overwhelming, like trying to drink from a fire hose when all I wanted was a glass of water. And yet, I can’t bring myself to press delete. There’s a strange safety in knowing the photo exists, even if I never look at it again. These photos don’t preserve the feeling of the moment, but they keep me tethered to the fact that it happened. 

At the same time, though, it makes me wonder if holding onto every scrap actually weakens my ability to hold onto the parts that matter most. If memory is supposed to be selective, shaped by forgetting as much as remembering, then what does it mean that my phone won’t let me forget? It feels existential: The more I try to preserve, the more diluted each memory becomes, until they blur into one endless camera roll that feels less like the story of my life and more like an unsorted attic of an old house. The photos are funny, sweet, dumb, and sometimes precious, but they also remind me that technology has made it possible to cling to everything, and in doing so, I risk dulling the sharp edges of the moments that actually matter.

It makes me think about the balance between living in the moment and trying to hold on to it. I strongly hesitate to judge people who record everything, say entire concerts on their phones, because I recognize the impulse — the want to remember everything. Because I am that person, taking photos and filming things I know I’ll never rewatch. But if I do rewatch them, the video never sounds or looks like what it felt like to actually be there, but I want to be there again. 

Photos are supposed to preserve memory, but sometimes they replace it. I don’t have to remember what my friends and I were doing in high school, because my phone remembers for me. But that might be the very problem: When every moment is documented, remembering becomes passive. 

I don’t think the solution is to stop taking photos altogether. Photos anchor me to people and places I don’t want to ever lose. I don’t want to stop taking pictures, and I probably won’t. And to be honest, by next week, I’ll probably have a few hundred more.  But I don’t really know how to solve the problem I’ve created for myself either. Because if every second is captured, then none of it feels rare. And sometimes, the best memories aren’t on our phones at all. They’re in the moments we let pass without reaching for the camera — the ones that live only in us. 

I’ve turned into a passive rememberer instead of an active one, and honestly, you probably have too. But memory isn’t about hoarding proof, it’s about choosing what matters. My iPhone Storage might be full, but my mind is not limited in the same way. The real practice is learning to let go, so the memories we do keep can actually breathe.