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>As objects, paper tickets serve as proof of past lives long after their brief utility as proof of payment. I sat with my accidental time capsule for more than
by jasode 2y ago
>As objects, paper tickets serve as proof of past lives long after their brief utility as proof of payment. I sat with my accidental time capsule for more than an hour, doing what my teenage self had probably hoped I might: linking each one to a buried memory as best I could. [...] But most of the tickets I’d bought myself, in person and almost always with cash, at box offices or the Ticketmaster counter at the local grocery store. They looked like they’d been printed on a machine even older and more obsolete than the “Ticketmaster counter” as a concept. You don’t need to be a techno-pessimist to acknowledge that digital tickets, for all their advantages in transferability and traceability, don’t serve this long-tail purpose.
I did the exact opposite. I hung onto a bunch of paper TicketMaster stubs for decades because I was indecisive about throwing them away or hanging on to them. The "sentimental baggage" surrounding those tickets distorted my thinking and attached too much importance too them.
And then I read about de-cluttering your life advice from minimalists and learned of a good hack that worked for me: Just take photos of your mementos and then throw them away.
That was the psychological breakthrough I needed. I digitally scanned all my old Ticketmaster stubs as *.tif files and then threw them out. I also had a bunch of useless novelty coffee mugs (free gifts from trade shows or past employers). I just took digital photographs of each mug and then gave them away at Goodwill. Preserving them digitally helped me let go of the physical objects. Everyone once in a while, I might revisit my digital scans of the concert tickets on my computer monitor and that's good enough for me.
Reading passages like hers reminds me that that some people need those physical mementos and some don't. In a similar vein, a lot of people like physical media like DVDs and CDs. In contrast, I got rid of my entire physical library of thousands of discs. I don't miss the space they took up at all.
- ghaff 2y agoYeah, I tend to hold onto physical theater programs and the like. And I look at them maybe once in forever and maybe bore guests with them from time to time. The theater I have a season ticket with stopped printing programs and that's actually just fine. I still save the one sheet flyers they send out but I don't actually care about the bios of the actors, etc. My main issue with electronic tickets and the like is I really prefer to have a relatively robust set of records when traveling. I have broken a phone on a trip and the only reason it wasn't that big a deal was that I had paper info about my itinerary etc.
- TZubiri 2y agosame. Something that also works for me is compressing. Either by filtering: Of a bag of 100 tickets, or hard drives, keep the most important one. Or reduction: Of a whole page of math doodles, cut everything except the most important part.
- linebeck 2y agoI think it's highly dependent on the significance of the memento. I have physical credentials I received for a major athletic event I competed in, and never in my life would I consider taking a picture of them and throwing them away. It doesn't sound like you were all that attached to the coffee mugs to begin with, in which case digitizing them was a good move. I'd imagine this is part of the reason why my parents still keep my terrible first grade art pieces framed on their desks.
- nsxwolf 2y agoI did this with a couple hundred big box MS-DOS games around 2002.
- psunavy03 2y agoDepending on the quality of your audio equipment, some disks (Blu-Rays mainly) are a better experience audio-wise than streaming. So there is a point to some physical media beyond sentimentality, at least until streaming services up their audio game. And I don't even consider myself an audiophile or feel a need to get snobby about it; it's just when I watched a movie on UHD Blu-Ray as opposed to streaming, I went "wow, you can really notice the sound quality."
- kjkjadksj 2y agoAlso black levels that aren’t compressed to shit