💾 Archived View for daintyeco.smol.pub › belongings captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:22:57. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Since years, I have been over the pretense of having any sort of control over my, or any, physical or digital possessions.
I will be careful with them in a reasonable way; I treat all my things well, I don't throw or drop them, they have cases if needed, they are cleaned, I make an effort not to do anything that unnecessarily damages the outside or inside, or harms the battery. I secure them appropriately. While 99% of things are not special to me and are replaceable to me, I don't take this as a sign to treat it like it is.
But I will not burden myself with the care pointlessly. I have never seen the point of buying something and then being afraid to use it, or saving it for a special occasion that might never come, or invest lots of mental energy and money to protect it from normal wear and tear. The people who put these clear plastic covers over couches, or never want to use the fancy china, are completely up their own ass about scratches on their car, or never wear the expensive shoes or jewelry they bought out of fear are people I don't get.
Most items deprecate in value regardless of what you do with it - most are not minted unopened collector editions. Things we use will break, have scratches, rust, dust, get lost, get taken away again, become obsolete, and can be involved in accidents. This is life. Even if I manage to keep all my things in perfect or good condition until I die, that's where my protection and care stops and they'll likely get properly used by someone else now or get thrown out. I cannot take anything with me in death. Meanwhile, I would have had none of the advantages of them in my life if I would have restricted my access and use of them. So why do it?
Even other minimalists will try to hold on to things in a way I find cumbersome - No, I don't sync and backup all my photos, handwritten letters, bills, certificates, notes and other documents and digitalize it all constantly on a cloud and an HDD. Select few things, yes, but I don't stress about it. Did I take a picture of my trophy collection before I gave it away? Sure, but I will probably never look at it again. I have images of emotionally relevant letters, but do I immediately know where? No. That's okay for me. I don't want to tirelessly sit on digital file systems and regularly have to back it all up to 2-3 sources and meticulously sort it into years and months, and worry about security and proper syncing and file loss.
I can bear to lose it all. All my pictures, all of my documents; it would be a hassle to lose the cloud saves of my university documents, but it would be bearable. In case of pictures, I only keep very little anyway and I try to remind myself that for most of human history, we did not have pictures of us and our everyday life, later we only had this for special occasions, until it slowly increased. We thrived without having much to document our life aside from little drawings or a diary, often not even those. 98% of pictures I take are ones I will never look at again and never need again. Some selfies and definitely dog pictures and relationship memorabilia are great to keep for personal history and nostalgia, but no more than that. And if those were somehow gone forever, I would be okay with it.
I have accepted that not everything can last, not even digitally. Corrupted drives, corrupted clouds, corrupt save data, incompatible formats, conversion errors, stolen and lost devices, accidental deletion by user, account deletions and bans, bankruptcy of a service, shutdown of a feature you relied on, free plans ending, the service ceasing operation in your country. All of this can happen.
Thankfully, there is no official document I desperately need that I can never get back. I know exactly which files I need and I do have a go-folder, basically, but I can just reorder these docs too.
We can see it outside of pictures and documents too: We are always losing and missing out on things to stream all the time because of streaming licenses ending and there being no physical release. Websites go offline and have not been, or very poorly been, backed up to the Internet Archive. Flash games don't work anymore, with many lost even after the gathering and restoration efforts of some sites trying to bring them back. Game launchers can take games from me all the time if I purchased those through them for all kinds of reasons, and they can delete my entire account if I don't log in often enough. I have lost all kinds of direct message communication through deleting of chats and accounts. I have lost mail communication through an email providers' 30 day autodelete. Many people out there have lost voice mail of their deceased loved ones. It is unavoidable.
I don't want to get bogged down by things and their maintenance, and their security measures that add more difficulty and worry into my life just to attempt to prevent the inevitable. It feels like an arms race of failure vs. neurotic methods, attempting to control what cannot be controlled.
All I need in this life is a functional body and a support system, everything else is a bonus I can live without if needed and I will not lose my life over possessions. Too many people indebt themselves over possessions, run back into the burning house for possessions, get hurt or killed trying to defend their possessions from others, and do some risky stuff to get their belongings back. I am not about that at all.
𓇽 ° . ༻ 𓈒 ꒪ ๋ ° .𓏲⠀ ๋࣭ ♡ ͘ ࣭⠀⸰ ⋆ ֗ ִ ᨒ .⋆ﾟ. ͘ ࣭⠀⸰ ♡ 𓂂 ◌ 𓇽 ° . ๋ 𓂂 ⠀✼ 𓇽