if everything digital vanished tomorrow, what’s the one thing you’d keep?🌹

felt, not fed.

i’ve looked for the moment i became dependent on the digital, and the more i looked, the more i had to keep looking. i can’t tell you when it is, as there is nothing i can point to. my searching stopped when i understood that not being able to find it is the exact answer i was looking for. there was no moment because this dependency happened slowly and through time, and this dynamic made me completely not realize what was actually happening.

the more of my life it took, the less i saw it happening. if i am looking back now, all those moments of reaching for my phone while taking a short break from work, or even while working at times, or filming first just to “preserve the experience or relive it later” instead of experiencing it first, and so many others, became normal to me, and i completely stopped paying attention to them.

but if the digital became my normal, then what are the things i actually paid attention to or remembered? well, they were the ones when i was completely disconnected from the digital.

i rarely, if ever, talk about a purely digital memory. it has to be rooted in the thing that isn’t my normal to actually remember it. and don’t get me wrong. i didn’t choose this on purpose, but i think we always remember the most the things that break the pattern. and the digital became my pattern.

and it’s weird because in a way i believe we started using all of this to remember everything for us, and somehow it’s the thing making most of my life impossible to remember. we are giving it so much of us, and what we get back is a life we can’t actually recall.

we are at a point where we can save more than anyone ever has, but we are also remembering less than anyone ever has.

i know that i keep coming back to this, but the feed is where most of this lives. the feed is designed on purpose to have no end. it just keeps going for as long as you want to be on it. and most of the posts hold no weight anymore.

everything is being made just for the sake of being made and to fill a spot in the algorithm, and things are usually forgotten the moment we see them. but as i said, this is how the feed is made to work, and i believe that a feed that let you keep things wouldn’t be a feed anymore. it needs you to let go of each thing so you can get to the next one.

so we’ve gotten really good at letting go of everything, without meaning to, because i don’t think we actually wanted this, and we also didn’t even notice that we’re doing it. when we are fed thousands of things at once, we don’t know which one to “save,” or we “save” too many of them, and thus, none of them actually stay with us. and after enough years of that, i think we start forgetting that we know how to actually hold onto something.

this entire reflection and the fact that i was going through (and still am from time to time) everything i mentioned here is what made me ask, if everything digital vanished tomorrow, what’s the one thing i’d keep?

the reason i went for one thing instead of everything is that if i am allowed to save the latter, then i end up saving absolutely nothing, which is the same thing that the thing that gave birth to this question does.

but when i only get to keep one, i actually have to choose, which is the whole point. to me, the thing we’d save is the thing we’d never scroll past. it’s the thing that’s left when everything else is gone.

we’ve built this entire world that we are so addicted to that could be gone in a moment, and we’ve reached a point where only a few people have stopped asking what they’d want on the other side of it.

so that’s what i am asking with this question. we’re living in a time that’s trying to replace everything, but i deeply believe that now we need to put more emphasis on the things you can’t replace.

so i decided to bring to life a wall on which people write down the thing they’d save on a small scrap and place it on it. there are no metrics or order that rewards absolutely anything. there’s no top, no ladder to climb, and it’s anonymous the whole way through. all these ideas were chosen because i wanted to make the only reason to leave something be that it meant something to you.

the wall doesn’t end either. i know this might sound weird coming from someone who keeps talking about finitude and even spent a big part of this essay against an endless thing. but the wall being endless is the opposite of the feed being endless, even though it’s the same word. the feed goes on forever and every new thing pushes the old ones further down until they’re gone for good. it grows so that things get buried.

the wall grows too, but nothing on it ever gets pushed down or covered over or made to matter less because something newer showed up. it stays exactly where it is, for as long as the wall is alive. i wanted it to go on forever for the opposite reason which is nothing anyone leaves ever gets lost. the entire point of it is to stay. the only finite part is you. the act of leaving your one thing is the finite thing living inside the endless one.

so, if everything digital vanished tomorrow, what’s the one thing you’d keep?

i’ve already left mine there.🌹