In a world where every moment can be cataloged, we find ourselves documenting our lives through phones, curated playlists and ticket stubs. The urge to archive our experiences has taken on an almost compulsive quality.
From the delicate scrawls of a teenager’s journal to the digital highlights of Instagram stories, we’ve become a generation of archivists, determined to preserve the ephemeral. Is it self-reflection, or is it something deeper—an attempt to control fleeting moments, to preserve the essence of our lives before time erases it?
I used to journal sporadically, mostly to vent. Over time, I began writing about everything: random thoughts, feelings, moments that seemed worth keeping. It felt good at first, but eventually, I began to question myself.
Am I obsessed with preserving my life?
The act of writing became frustrating—my thoughts raced ahead, faster than my hand could move across the page. I wanted to record everything as if archiving it all would help me understand myself better. What was I trying to achieve?
Do I really need to save every concert wristband or movie ticket? My phone is full of photos and videos I rarely revisit. I realized my camera roll had become a shrine to my life – or at least, the version of it I wanted to remember.
I’ve accepted that I’ll never fully remember a moment the way I want to, and that’s okay—what matters is how it made me feel. Even now, I romanticize the idea of my journals being discovered someday.
The obsession isn’t limited to journaling, though. It’s everywhere. Even our digital lives, from Twitter drafts and Instagram story highlights, to your TikTok reposts and Snapchat memories, serve as virtual archives, repositories of our moods, our thoughts and our fleeting expressions.
Take concerts, for example. You’ve been waiting for this show for months, and when the moment finally arrives, instead of immersing yourself in the music, you’re holding up your phone, recording every single song. For what? You’re never going to watch all of it. Maybe just your favorite song, but not the entire set, right? Meanwhile, the experience itself—the sound of the bass, the pulse of your heart in time with the music, the energy of the crowd—is slipping away from you.
It’s a strange paradox—our phones promise us a way to preserve memories, but in doing so, they rob us of the ability to fully experience them.
At its core, this obsessive record-keeping comes from wanting to understand ourselves, to not feel misunderstood. Perhaps it stems from a fear of forgetting, a deep-seated anxiety that the memories we hold most dear will inevitably fade. In a world that moves at a breakneck pace, where the present is constantly supplanted by the new, we cling to the tangible evidence of our experiences, as if to say;
“This happened. I was here.”
We’re trying to archive the parts of our lives that make us feel human, that make us feel alive. While that impulse comes from a place of love and appreciation for life, it’s easy to get lost in the process. When the act of documenting overtakes the act of living, that’s when it becomes a problem.
In the end, it’s about finding balance. After all, the most profound experiences are often those that defy documentation, and that exist solely in the realm of the senses, the emotions and the connection between souls.
It is in those fleeting, unrecorded instances that we truly feel alive, untethered from the need to prove our existence to ourselves or to the world.
So, the next time you find yourself reaching for your phone at a concert or obsessively trying to journal every detail of your day, pause for a moment. Ask yourself, “Am I truly living this, or am I just trying to save it for later?”
Maybe it’s time to let go a little, to be okay with not remembering every detail, but rather the feeling it left behind.
