How much of what you snap is really what you want to remember?

That’s my older brother on the left and me on the right. I know, I didn’t have much hair.

As I reach my right hand into my right pocket to locate my iPhone, I am comforted by the feeling that my bike ride will soon be accompanied by the voice of a late night radio show host followed by some 90s hits.

But it’s not there. It’s not there! It’s not in my right pocket (where it always is). How can this be?

I panic.

It has been out of battery for the last few hours and my main response has been to ignore it, until I was able to get home and bring it back to life.

I maneuver the bike into the best 180 degree turn I can and retrace my steps to where I had it last. I illegally ride on the wrong side of the road (I live in Copenhagen, it’s illegal), my head looking down, frantically trying to spot the iPhone, hoping and wishing that an innocent bystander has taken sympathy to it and was standing with it waiting for its rightful owner to return.

My heart pounds, I speed up, I slow down at every glimmer until I get back to the original spot where I knew I had it last, and alas, come to the realisation that it has gone from lost to officially stolen.

At first, I was fine. My own personal journey towards minimising material objects in my life, meant that I was mentally prepared to withdraw from the fact that it was but a replaceable object.

So I turned around, and biked home, this time ever so calmly and slowly.

(Cue waterworks)

I HAVE LOST MY PHOTOS.

My mind immediately starts to playback my phone’s camera roll like a 1950s slide projector. With every realisation that every photo captured in my phone was probably on its way to being wiped out forever, I was hurting that much more.

My trip to celebrate Chinese New Year with my family in Toronto, our trip to Vancouver to visit friends, my first trip to Austin for SXSW — photos of my family whom of which I see (if I am lucky) once a year, that was supposed to last me until the next year, gone.

All the plans to make photo books, calendars, collages for birthdays, pictures for the wall to be blown up into life size, gone.

Every receipt, screenshot, inspiration photos for future projects I wanted to do, songs I wanted to download and paintings from museum trips I wanted to research again.

GONE.

This is when I realised, that I had been using my phone not just as a camera, but as a scanner, a digital copier, my secondary memory, a scrapbook of all the things I needed to do, desired to do and wanted to remember for later.

But what was I most sad about? Definitely not the 3000 photos I had accumulated. In fact, having all those photos in the first place, was what drove my stress levels high enough that I avoided backing them up in the first place (at this point my last backup was in Dec 2014).

Why would I back up stuff I don’t actually want? Better yet, cloud storage was so easy but why would I PAY for useless duplicates, blurred photos and photos of things I didn’t actually want to remember?

So I didn’t. And now I have to face the consequences and deal with my own realisation that while I was keen on minimising the physical world around me, I was collecting garbage in my digital world and letting it make me feel bad.

In actuality, I could only remember approximately about 10 photos I really wanted to have for the rest of my life. And if it were only 10, I would have been able to easily upload them to a cloud storage.

But I was letting my own digital manifestation and new-found-smartphone-camera-click-happy behaviour, create a mounting sense of anxiety that was connected to the lost 3500 photos which had diminishing marginal utility with every additional photo.

Through my five stages of grief (am I still in denial if I haven’t erased my iPhone from Find my iPhone yet?) I have suffered anger; I have blamed my shallow pockets; I’ve written a message to tell the perpetrators (through Find my iPhone) that I didn’t care about the phone, I just wanted my pictures; I have been extremely sad and now, I am ready to accept reality.

And the reality is, my photos are gone.

But there is so much life left to live, and I intend to continue to take photos because living in a picturesque city and having wonderful life adventures, means that I should.

But the real questions I need to ask myself are:

1. When I snap a photo, do I really want to have it?
2. When I store photos to the cloud, do I really want to keep them?
3. With so many photos, how do I prioritise the ones I really want?