[lightcatcher]

> It feels as if the point that I'm trying to make is that mindful archiving is a better solution than to just 'keep all the things'

On the topic of plain text things (such as text messages) - how much data are you actually hoarding?

Let's say you type 100 words per minute for the next 40 years (and each word is 10 bytes). No sleep, no breaks, just 40 years of typing. Congratulations, you just produced 21GB of data. This fits on an SD card (<$30) or in the cheapest tier of cloud backup like Dropbox or Google Drive. You can search your 40 years of typing in well under a minute. If you remember the year you typed in, you can grep the data from that year in under a second.

I don't like the term "hoarding" for this. Hoarding has a negative connotation. Storage of plaintext is so incredibly cheap (and search so fast) that I feel that option value of retaining the text is almost always greater than the miniscule cost of storage and slower retrieval.

I don't think are any valid analogies between storing physical items and digital items, as digital storage and search is orders of magnitude cheaper. Consider the same experiment where one writes with pen and paper for 40 years, and then wishes to search for the name "George".

Making a decision of what to keep must be more expensive and time-consuming than just keeping everything.