A decluttering retrospective

I spent a few years here blogging about my decluttering process. A post I wrote in December 2016 titled goodbye junk is illustrative. I grew up in households where things played an oversized role, so to be able to be more ruthless with junk in my own life felt liberating. Well it’s been a decade, and I have some Thoughts™ about the whole thing. Not extending this to digital decluttering I didn’t directly address this in those old posts, though I hinted at it the FAQ section of that 2016 goodbye junk post: Anything flat (photos, cards, papers) can be scanned and thrown away. I now think scans are superior to originals: they can be backed up, they won’t degrade, and they can be put into albums alongside digital photos to make a complete timeline of my life. It’s pretty cool. Around the same time minimalism was in vogue, people were also talking about “digital decluttering”. This was the idea that we all pay for these cloud hosting services to archive all our digital lives, when the…