Personal anecdote, but one thing that I noticed last year while reorganizing all the digital photos I took over the last 17 years is how technological change sh

Personal anecdote, but one thing that I noticed last year while reorganizing all the digital photos I took over the last 17 years is how technological change shaped my digital archives and subsequently how well I remember my past. With my old dedicated digital camera and sd cards, I got nice folders with meaningful event names and dates and clear of the useless stuff not worth keeping around. Obviously, it required some work to be able to watch the pictures on the computer,let alone share them, so it was easy to spend a few more minutes to have nice digital archives. Nowadays, the smartphone took over: click, ok nice picture, click click, and shared! It's nice and practical but now my picture collection of the past few years is a bloated and unorganized stream of nice and bad pictures mixed with of paper document copies and other random stuff I no longer care about. And guess what, I still have quite a good memory of 10-15 year old events and their timeline while it's much fuzzier for the last few years. Got to talk about it with my therapist at the time and he said it's quite probable that taking some time to organize your digital stuff along the way may help you form better memories you'll have an easier time to remember later on. Same thing with music or movies I guess, odds are you may have this neatly organized old hard drive full of mp3 that'll tell you what you liked in 2012... Nowadays we can stream everything and are pushed to act in a fire-and-forget way without a single debrief in sight ;) Anyways, smartphones are wonderful tools but I feel like the danger is in the subtle psychological and behavioral changes they introduce and that we too often don't or won't notice until it's too late.