I have moved into the 21st century! For the first time, I’ve migrated my entire 15-year library of photos, music, and documents from a hunky spinning-disk hard drive to a palm-sized solid-state drive.
Something mixed came over me last evening when I clicked the “Copy to” button on my computer and began the three-hour-long transfer. I opened my little SSD the next day to see if everything carried over, and lo and behold—there it was. Everything. My whole young adult life up until now, in my 30s, all tucked into a device that could fit inside the watch pocket of my jeans. (That stupid little extra pocket, by the way, was added by Levi Strauss for pocket watches!)
As I clicked, scrolled, zoomed, and rotated through my life, I had a funny feeling about the accessibility of it all. With no barriers and instant access, is there also a fleeting loss of the gratitude we once felt for these memories?
Think about the hundreds of photos you might take during any given weekend event, or on a trip to the zoo, or at a concert. Out of the thousands I’ve taken over the years, I rarely look through them one by one. Because I can take so many, and access them so easily, I don’t hold the same appreciation for them as I do for my mom’s photo albums—each one maybe 100 pictures carefully placed in a book she still keeps. With those, I spend long moments on each picture. Every few years I even find myself asking, “Where’s that album with our pictures from the Toledo Zoo?!”
Not to oust myself for being totally irresponsible, but a little over a year ago my wife’s grandfather passed, and we drove separately to his funeral in Columbus—a city I’d never been to before. I set out early, with an arrival time about 15 minutes before the service. But 20 minutes into my drive, my phone shut down without warning and refused to turn back on. Long story short, my phone’s motherboard was fried and beyond saving. I hadn’t backed it up in almost a year and began the grieving process for the thousands of photos I had taken during that time.
“Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?” – Joni Mitchell
After a lot of searching for a recovery service, mailing my phone to another state, and paying an absurd amount of money for experts to resolder my motherboard and recover the photos—here’s what I realized: if I had been told I could bring back only the pictures I actually remembered taking, I’d have maybe 20.
So how could I have spent so much time shooting, and so little time remembering or appreciating? Instant access and digital luxury have made my brain cozy with the idea that I’ll never have to think back. When every second of my life is recordable, reachable, and in HD crystal clarity, I don’t do the work of remembering—and I don’t savor it.
This is all just inconsequential thinking, because I still carry a camera everywhere and shoot hundreds of pictures a week. But maybe I could start printing a few out. Frame some. Hang a few on the wall. Put others in an album that will get dusty and yellowed with age, sitting on a shelf or in a tote.
Instead of booting up this little palm drive—which will likely get smaller and smaller while holding more and more—I’d like to have that warm, nostalgic feeling I get from my mom’s photo albums, with my own, someday.
-Wyatt
Wyatts Hobby Photos 