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Comment by sephoric | Hacker News Reader

I had room fulls of boxes of things that I thought might one day be important, or significant to someone. Then I realized, when I die, all those things are just going to be thrown away or donated to a thrift store, and it's highly unlikely that anyone who buys any of that will find the same value in it that I thought it had. If I have created anything truly timeless and worthwhile, then it had better be something I created for a client and got paid for making, otherwise it's just going to probably end up in a garbage heap. So I made a decision to get rid of all of it. Time is too short to be held down by the (truly) endless possibilities of "what if" this or that thing ends up being useful to someone in the future.

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Yeah, keeping physical things around does only make sense if it is actually valuable to someone. Archives only accept objects actually worthwhile of keeping. But it's different for digital content, as it's so much easier to store. At least for now.

Also, Archaeologists love the garbage dumps and cesspits of old towns, literally the places where people put their least valuable things, because they weren't raided by earlier visitors and they can derive so much info about it. And it's nicely stratified so it gives some rough chronology.

Another way to look at this is that the more you store, the more difficult it is for people to actually find the valuable parts of what you've stored. One of the fascinating aspects of the internet is that our internet lives diverge so thoroughly from our offline lives - so the data we're leaving for the future is arguably horribly unrepresentative.

> difficult it is for people to actually find the valuable parts

That's why you need to catalog stuff.

And if you have stored something, you can always get rid of it if you deem it to be unimportant, but if you haven't stored it, most times you can't get it back. Erring on the side of storing unimportant things is an important strategy to cope with that.

The thing with internet content is that it's indexable and it's possible for every person interested to check it out. If you have boxes stored in some shed - it's much less so.

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