How Can We Bear to Throw Anything Away?
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- Опубліковано 21 лис 2024
- "Why" I cannot ask, though I would like to know, the answer has to be simply "because."
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All The Knowledge in the World (Simon Garfield, 2022)
MAUS (Art Spiegelman, 1980-1991)
Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (Matt Wolf, 2019)
The Disappearance of Classic Video Games (Video Game History Foundation (gamehistory.or...)
On Exactitude in Science (short film by Mothcub): • On Exactitude in Science
The Information Catastrophe (Melvin Vopson, 2020): pubs.aip.org/a...
Landlords of the Internet (Daniel Greene, 2022): journals.sagep...
Reflections as the Internet Archive turns 25 (Brewster Kahle, 2021): blog.archive.o...
In-Development Video Game Footage:
Hi-Fi Rush: • 『Hi-Fi RUSH』BPMによるモーショ...
Marvel’s Spider-Man: • Behind the Scenes - Sp...
Dead Space: • Dead Space - Early Dev...
God of War: • God of War: Baldur Fig...
Media shown: Stars Die, Pineapple on Pizza, Beton Brutal, Halo 3, Shadow of the Colossus, Metal Gear Solid 4, Super Mario Galaxy, Mirror’s Edge, Super Metroid, Your Shape: Fitness Evolved, Turbo: Super Stunt Squad, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12, Katamari Damacy
Music Used, chronologically: Overpriced Shop (TLoZ: Twilight Princess), Noire Clarinet, New Beginning Part 2 (L.A. Noire), In the Jailhouse Now (Jimmie Rodgers), New Eden- Puzzle (Mirror’s Edge), Blackburn (Killer7), GPigstick (Stealth Inc 2), Demo Loop (I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream), Castle in the Mist (ICO), The Timefall (Death Stranding), Russell’s Clean Radio (Half-Life: Alyx), Bells of Laguna Bend (Cyberpunk 2077), One Life to Live (UnearthU), The Salesman (Silver Maple), The Longest Night (Bladverk Band), They Dream by Day (Mellifera), Did Your Prince Ever Show Up (Magnus Ludvigsson), Infinite Love (Vendla), Útil Paisagem (Clara Mendes)
Additional music and sound effects from Epidemic Sound
Additional footage from Getty Images
Thumbnail and Graphic Design by / hotcyder
Description credit: The Woman Who Collects Noah's Arks by Janet McCann
Hello there. Did you know I do full "director's commentaries" on all of my videos? To hear where these ideas come from, why I made certain editing decisions, and a whole bunch of other topics, jump on my patreon and check 'em out: www.patreon.com/JacobGeller
So hyped for the stream, thanks for the videos
Rather than "investing" in shaving implements, I just wait for my boss to get upset and yell at me while tossing a disposable my way.
I've never played ICO (I need to) but I KNEW that sounded famliar.. it's a gorgeous song.
Thank you Mega64 :) that video still cracks me up. "HUP HUP!"
You should read The Tyranny of Things.
Why are your cheeks blue?
It's time to download every one of Jacob's videos in the event of his untimely demise
This but unironically
Fancy seeing the funny shark hunter here
This comment has been added to the rtgame comment archive in event of rt's untimely demise
it's you! the him
And now I know that Kevin watches Jacob Geller
When I was a little kid my mom gave me this picture book called Grover and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Museum. The last room in the museum has a door labeled "Everything Else" and it turns out to be an exit to the outside. It has haunted me more than any piece of art I've ever consumed.
But you can't deny, it's the perfect ending for the book. :)
@@Cyan37it's perfect fr
I HAD THAT BOOK! I’ve thought about it frequently - that last page in particular - but I could never remember its title, so I’d begun thinking I’d hallucinated it. Thank you! My word, but 1970s Sesame Street was totally high art. What a decade for children’s books in the USA!
as a kid i had "the Monster at the End of this Book", a story about Grover begging the reader to stop turning pages and doing everything he could to prevent it because he didn't want to meet the monster at the end of the book. it turned out HE was the monster in question, so it was fine, but i still remember even while knowing the ending, i felt bad rereading it- Grover crying on his knees and pleading with you not to turn the pages of a book because he's scared is very effective on a kid
Oh this just unearthed a DEEP memory for me, wow.... I can just barely remember being haunted by it as a child as well. I was very sensitive to things like that, I probably took it very hard
A friend in hs had a laptop full of patents, tutorials, scientific papers, stuff like that. Basically a bunch of information that, given that the laptop survives, and that there's available resources, someone could theoretically use that to rebuild after some catastrophe. He just thought it was a neat idea, so he did it
As a fellow doomer anarchist I would love to inquire if I could have a copy of this archive, Im from UK btw
@@RedstoneNinja99arguably your best bet for this would be downloading a local copy of Wikipedia. Might not have everything, but it’ll have most of what is useful.
@@RedstoneNinja99 I'm afraid I don't know how to contact him anymore as I kinda suck at getting people's contact info lmao
@@RedstoneNinja99if it's any help there's a book called "the knowledge: how to rebuild our world from scratch" that sets out to achieve a similar goal. I have not read it so I cannot attest to the quality but it does sound like something that would interest a doomer anarchist.
@@saudade7842 At least he knows how to contact you if needed 🤭🤭
My grandmother had a bunch of photo albums on her shelves for years. She died recently and I realized I never saw her look at any of them. It’s not about going back and looking at everything. It’s about knowing it’s there. It’s peace of mind to know, if you had to, you could prove you existed.
reading that hit me like a freight train
😭
ua-cam.com/video/xkwqiqsfoZw/v-deo.htmlsi=1gmaBePvqSJ8TIYj
My father used to sing this song because he was so uncomfortable with pictures and I went back to listen and it was so strange realizing what it meant
My family has a decent collection of photo albums, and I love the experience every couple years when we move or do some cleaning of going through all of them. It's really an awesome thing that I can't thank my mother enough for.
You hit the nail on the head here. I have so much stuff stashed away, "just in case" I want to see it someday. But I never look at any of it. I have a very hard time deleting text messages for the same reason. I just need to know the info is there.
Throughout most of my teen years and early twenties, I had this friend who I idolized (yet also kinda sometimes hated) that would constantly do "novel style roleplay" with me--we'd write out the actions of our characters in a style akin to a fiction novel (rather than like a movie script or **walks across room** "hi!") We played constantly--a little too constantly, I remember she called me once (long distance, as this was in the early days of consumer level cell phones) during a very rare outing with in-person friends, begging me to come home and play more with her. Nonetheless, we produced literally millions of twelve point font, single spaced stories together, richly intricate characters and plots, real emotions for what we put those characters through (often it felt like they chose the story for themselves and we were just along for the ride...)
At 28, she died very suddenly of a heart attack, and suddenly we could create stories no more. This was at least ten computers ago, and I still have some of those stories floating around in harddrives that I don't have the tech skill (or energy) to recover. I tried printing out one of our never-ending stories once, but at 1000 pages and still not halfway through, I gave up.
Once about a year after her death, I made the mistake of contacting her husband to ask for his blessing in taking the spirit of our stories and trying to write something more like an actual beginning-middle-end novel with them, and of course the asshole said no...even though I wasn't going to take any of her writing or characterization directly, so I really didn't need his permission, it was more a gesture of kindness. Of course, the DAY she died, he burned all her physical art books and deleted all her websites, including her three webcomics, as if he wanted to destroy any trace of her existence--he also remarried an alleged friend of hers less than a month after her death. I assume he'd been cheating on her before she ever died.
Anyway, I still haven't had the attention span to put together that novel, but it's still a "someday maybe" in my mind. I still try to remember her in little ways--in fact my second-born son, now five, is named after one of her characters. Maybe someday once the kids are older and I'm not so split between my many other side projects, I'll finally dig out those old drives and salvage what I can. (Though I doubt I'd ever be able to reread all of it...there are literally tens of thousands if not millions of pages of stories...)
hearing what you said about her husband is heartbreaking, how can people be so heartless? but it’s sweet to know you still cherish the memories she made with you
Type less grandma.
Maybe I see too many tv shows, but a heart attack at 28 is insanely rare, with how this man, the day she died basically deleted everything that was ever hers, it makes you wonder if he played a part in her death somehow. Like if he cared about her so little that he wanted to instantly delete everything that was hers it really makes you wonder why he was with her even, and if he remarried that quickly, it really makes me wonder if he was somehow involved in her death. Maybe not through direct action but possible by neglect or inaction.
OKAY so this is eerily similar to the story of me and my friend, except we kept our stories mostly in the form of voice memo over 7 years. We both grew up in China, and let’s just say circumstances made the endeavor difficult, but these stories were our greatest pride and joy at the time.
I went no contact with her during one of the many, many mental breakdowns I had in my early adulthood (like you, I almost idolized her and kinda hated her at the same time). What I did was undoubtably toxic, even abusive, and it will forever remain one of my biggest regrets. Today I don’t even know whether she is dead or alive.
Even though I wasn’t able to preserve any of the stories we created together (again, circumstances), I’d like to think I will always carry a part of them with me-as cliché as that sounds. I can’t say for sure whether that’s just a cope… all I can do is to keep writing.
The burning is horrific wow. Considering she kept all that it was probably unbelievably valuable to her and him disrespecting her like that just makes me so sad :(+
“He throws it up into the sky, and it becomes a star” has gotta be my new favorite Jacob Geller ending line
I know right? It made me tear up and he's talking about Katamari Damacy of all things!
This is one area tumblr got right (for now). Being able to reblog and share an old popular post where everyone involved has since deleted their accounts several years ago really does feel like keeping a little piece of history alive.
That reminds me of a Facebook group I’m in called ‘Unearthing crusty/obscure images’. People find random photo uploads from the 2000s and share them into the group. Many of the accounts are inactive, but occasionally you’ll see one where the person is still active and has married someone in the photo lol. It’s like looking through history
@@AzariaBell24reminds me of a group I happened to be in that would post photos that have become insanely low res. Well one stumbled across a post from a fast food chain from the early 2000's. Only reason it was so crusty was Facebook lowering the resolution over time to save space
Jacob: *talks about how his grandmother's experiences made her reluctant to throw things away*
Me: *remembers reading the same thing in Maus*
Jacob: In Art Spiegelman's Maus-
Beautiful and thought-provoking as always, thank you for your work
Had the exact same experience, I could see the "ach" panel in my head before he said it! Disgusting that american states have actually been banning Maus in recent years :(
@@xanderkhan73what really? why
@@floppyearfriend "innapropriate language" and an illustration of a naked woman, it's suppression under the guise of morality
@@floppyearfriend The far right doesn't like anything that points out the negative effects of fascism (or anything pointing out how to recognize it). They use the inappropriate language (and nudity) depicted in it as a reason to get it banned from schools. It's pretty insidious (and fascist).
When I studied archaeology, I came across the idea that the urge to preserve things, to make them last forever, is something that arises specifically in sedentist societies. This is probably a result of long-term sedentism, of living surrounded by monuments from increasingly distant centuries or millennia- the societies that produced your German and Chinese encyclopedias. What interests me about this is that many more nomadic/mobile societies, and particularly those with animist beliefs, hold that inanimate things and ideas, as ensouled beings, are also mortal and will die. They will hold ceremonial funerals for old buildings whose maintenance is untenable or bury organic artefacts to lay them to rest and be reborn. A consequence of this I think about a lot is that many archaeologists, far from the old Indiana Jones cliché ("it belongs in a museum!") are more equivocal about the importance of preserving everything for its own sake. There is a value in letting things go and moving on, of respectfully laying things to rest rather than maintaining a decontextualised shell of an artefact forever for its own sake.
I feel like your comment gave me more satisfaction than the resolution of the video.
I've felt drawn towards the basic principle of ensouled things, which I know from shintoism, but I've never investigated the implications these ideas hold any further.
Thank you!
I've been struggling lately with the concept of things coming to an end, due to various stresses in my personal life. Your explanation here, of a worldview I was previously unfamiliar with, actually gave me some very well needed perspective and peace of mind. I'll be thinking about this for a while, I'm sure. Thank you very much.
@goodguyflexo this sounds wonderful, I'll be sure to give it a read!
I agree with your basic idea, but even then the importance of preserving artifacts in their context is to... preserve the knowledge they can imbue us with. Archaeologists try not to disturb artifacts so they don't stand in the way of later scientific work - an anti-Schliemann approach if you will. So while yes, modern archaeology places more importance on letting things be the way they were, it is still in the pursuit of collecting data for the future - the exact contradictory point of discussion that this video arrives at.
Yeah, Japan is like that. Every Shinto shrine is torn down and rebuilt in a pattern, dolls are burned in ceremonies, and the idea that all things must end is inherent. Wabisabi, and the beauty of intransience
This actually hits pretty close to home, because when I was 12 I was cast as the lead in and a filmed a pilot episode to a now scrapped Nickelodeon show. They decided not to air it and erased all traces of it from the internet, and I haven’t been able to find it. I have reached out and they no longer have it to send to me and even if they did they wouldn’t. It was a great experience but still sad.
What was it about?
What circa? 90s, 2000s?
@@SCHMALLZZZ literally like 5 years ago I got that child actor swag
The odds are pretty good that if it was created within the last 20 years they have it on file somewhere. Corporations like Nick depend on content to define their value. Even just having it sitting on a server somewhere the cost of maintaining it is worth the value it adds to their IP. That's why the folks who own & run Sesame Street have old episodes you'll never see again archived (unless someone ends up leaking them but that's very unlikely-though it has happened at least a few times).
My advice is to keep your ear to the ground and touch base with any of your former cast and crew as someone somewhere knows someone who knows where the show you were in is.
@@ZiddersRooFurry Ive reached out a lot i dont think they letting me at it
I am a dad to two boys and everyday when they come home from daycare they bring the art projects and coloring pages and worksheets they did in class that day. I keep a box for each boy and whatever they bring home, I evaluate. Things that they put a lot of effort into, or are unique, or that I see them particularly attached to, I save. Everything else gets thrown out.
Every time I do that, I wonder if I'm making a mistake. In ten or twenty years they might look back at the things I've kept and they'll notice something absent that they expected to see, or I'll feel guilty by how little I preserved.
Thanks for the essay, Jacob. My experience feels small compared to trying to preserve all human knowledge about everything, but I think I understand the archivist's dilemma.
Perhaps your sons may be a bit too young, but as someone whose parents did this, I think you could benefit from including your sons in deciding what is kept or thrown away. My parents had a big folder of my drawings and would ask me if I wanted to keep whatever I had scribbled on that day.
Now that I have 10+ years to look back on my “artistic” endeavors, it brings back a lot of memories seeing the drawings that my younger self chose to slot into that big folder for preservation
@@throstlewanion That's such a good idea, doubling this
With the above suggestion, you could also possibly scan all the art, even the ones you get rid of, and store them on a hard drive or thumb drive. Then, they can always go back and look at everything, while not taking up too much space.
I recently looked through whatever was saved from when I was a kid that age, and all of it was basically meaningless to me. Except one drawing; it was crudely drawn stickperson Abraham holding a dagger and Isaac laying on an altar. The memory of hearing that story in school, and the absurdity that this image was put inside a 6 year olds mind just made me laugh. I will keep that drawing forever, because it's metal as fuck. The bible is messed up. Also I lied, there was a drawing of my family and our house, even my dog was there. I'll keep that one too.
My mother saved tubs and tubs worth of photos and homework and art from my childhood. I sorted through it all, kept about 80% of the photos, and threw away about 99.9% of the other stuff. If you determine that the financial and emotional tax of keeping that stuff is worth it to you, keep it. But most people dont want to sort through all of their childhood art work as an adult 😂. Hope you are well.
Jacob has an uncanny ability of taking an errant thought, bouncing corner-to-corner in my brain for years (like an old screensaver) and turning it into an incredibly entertaining and researched video, in a way that makes his videos seem like they were made for me alone.
The added bonus to this is, every time this happens, my mind can finally let that thought go and I am freed from having to think about it at 3am when I'm trying to go to sleep.
I guess what I'm trying to say, is thank-you.
Thank-you Jacob, for making these incredible videos that I can't stop watching and recommending to people, and thank-you for freeing me from thoughts outside my purview that I would never be able to sufficiently complete.
Lol for real it feels like their always about things you’ve actually thought about but are so far in the back of your head you had t even considered how to tie it in with everything else. I wish I could be freed like you though the videos usually just end up making me go even deeper down the rabbit hole. I swear one video about liminal space he made has sent me on a multi month trip involving the nature of nostalgia, dreams, and sense of self that still feels like I only keep racking up more branching thoughts but no real answers. This video in particular especially feels like it didn’t nearly scratch the thought from my head at all though it was still a great vid
The irony is that, we can't just forget about it because, it is a video uploaded to UA-cam, amid the information hoard, and could be lost - even without any consensus by Google on what shall be saved from the collapse...
36:00 “It’s fine, a little disappointing. He throws it up into the sky. It becomes a star.” This is the most summary of the history of everything ever. A perfect ending.
It was it made tear up :')
I literally cried and don’t know why.
This makes me think about my mother. She has embraced the declutter, throw it out if it does not spark joy mindset. When my parents were getting ready to move after they retired my mom threw a lot away (not all of it hers) and was getting ready to away or donate this bronze and marble statuette of a dancer. My dad stoped her because he kind of liked it and decided to look it up online. I don't remember the exact value but I remember thinking at the time that it was more than the downpayment on my house.
Goes to show you, don't throw stuff away, sell it!
@@Thunderous333 You'd gotta do a lot of research and cataloguing then, but hey, you'd get a lot from it.(Hopefully.)
*Just hope you find a vintage beany baby in all the clutter and rubble.*
One man's thrash, another man's treasure.
I use 130 years old machines to make high quality shoes. Lots of those are not produced anymore
Most tools are stamped with manufacturing dates way older than I am.
The youngest tools still have "made in w. Germany/GDR" on it.
They are worth a shitload of money, because making them from anew is damn expensive. A sole iron goes for 90€. I found a box full for 30 on a flea market.
I cry every time I think about people throwing this stuff away. "I don't need it and finding people who use it naaaa". And this in times of INTERNET.
It's incredible how Jacob can hold your hand and take you from a single point to rollercoaster of a journey, making u feel every emotion and finally stopping. His style of writing scripts is amazing.
I work in a museum and my job for the next 3 years is to sort through a pile of 200.000 small objects to turn them into a coherent collection. Today I got through several hundred and about 70% of those went to the discard pile (and I am generous at keeping because this is my first go-through). No idea how big this collection will end up being in 2,5 years.
This video will be on my mind.
How do you go about such a progress? Both having to "time it" to those 3 years and somehow deciding what to keep seems mindboggeling. What do you even do with the discarded stuff?
What an interesting (and occasionally heartbreaking) job
@@SuperAmaton I too am curious as to the answers to your questions
if this whole interaction isn't art, I don't know what is
Sounds like the museum I worked at (was in the archive) and it was amazing how much ended up in the discard pile
This video hit hard with me. I’m a kid of a (non-diagnosed) hoarder, not in a way that was too extreme, but in a way that we couldn’t have people over. It’s gotten better in recent years, but we still have collections. Bags full of plastic bags, thousands of dollars worth of untouched cookbooks, boxes of cheap, expired dollar store make-up, and stuff like that. I can see it happening in me. I get these little pangs of doubt whenever I throw away so much as a receipt or train ticket. A considerable amount of space in my journal is made up not of actually useful or at least sentimental writing but said receipts, tickets, soda tabs and bottle caps. When I was young, my dad used to describe my mother’s hoarding as her “trying to fill a hole in her heart”. It scares me that it’s caught on in me, a little.
We’re in the same boat :)
Having to clean up my mom’s place after her death, alone, made me hyperaware of my own sprawling inventory. And she didn’t teach me good household habits, so I’m learning from the ground up. My dad used to live in a flat and had not too many things in there, but now that he’s retired in a bigger place that he already owned, it’s clear that he has a ton of (very dusty) stuff. I’m not looking forward to that part again…
My belief is that we have to learn to build good habits and keep a vigilant eye out for our clutter. Discern what you absolutely must not lose (like crucial paperwork) from what you’d ideally like to haul throughout your life (family pictures, travel mementos, precious furniture…). Prepare for the worst, backing up the must-not-lose, and pre-mourning the loss of the rest (imagine being flooded or whatever). And watch out for growing old in your clutter: lots of people who live orderly, uneventful lives often grow to be very messy as they get older-having less energy, and being too used to some degree of inefficiency/discomfort in their home, they can easily stew in a dusty nest.
Marie Kondo is a good place to start, she teaches one way of practicing discernment. ^^
YANA - You Are Not Alone
@@leamubiu Yeah, after my Mom died and I had to clean out her apartment, I started taking the Japanese art of decluttering far more seriously lol
It's our squirrel brain's need to "stash nuts for the winter", metaphorically speaking; it stems from our need to stockpile resources or die heh
Excellent point about growing old in one's clutter! I was a messy kid and always balked at my Mom's "a place for everything and everything in its place" then but what you described is similar to what happened to her ...
I completely understand and relate but the bag of bags isnt a hoarding thing that's just Wisconsin culture
@@gingertrash64 Which extends to Illinois lol
I knew this video would end up mentioning Marion Stokes. A lot of mentions of her online seem to brand her an obsessive compulsive hoarder who had an odd mental break. But she was simply someone who had (a lot of) time on her hands and wanted to preserve the way we were, because she saw the value in that when many others could not. She had to be a hoarder to do that, yes (vhs tapes are huge), but she wasn't a crazy person. Thanks for one of the more fair mentions of her I've seen online.
It is actually quite a challenge to effectively archive tape media, because it needs to be climate controlled and kept in a clean environment to prevent the tapes from molding. It's one of the reasons that standalone data tape archiving machines are internally climate controlled with lots of filtration and adequate airflow.
The word "crazy" is such a commonly used pejorative, yet people who use them rarely stop to think about what actually defines "craziness". Arguably, some of the world's greatest people (successful billionaires, politicians, artists, and athletes) deviate from the layman in some fundamentally psychological way. There has to be a degree of sociopathy found in those billionaires who deliberately screw over their workers in pursuit of wealth. Most significantly, billionaires horde money much like how Stokes horde tapes, but we would hardly ever think of the two as victims of the same condition.
I'm glad that people are paying more attention to psychology and destigmatizing mental illnesses nowadays, but it's really kinda wild looking back and seeing people throw around such loaded words so casually.
She may have been a hoarder, but she was meticulous. The photos of her hoard show how she cared for it and kept it clean. Had she not, the tapes would have been useless. I think she's a great example of how there is greatness in madness and madness in greatness. She couldn't have gifted future generations what she did had she not been so extreme in her efforts.
I'm often dismissed for discussing legacy level storage in my IT classes. I encourage people to download important photos, songs, documents, etc to CD, which people think is absurd. But they're genuinely one of the most cost effective stable storage devices for the average person. A single box of CDs could hold an entire family history of photos, documents, and other digital keepsakes. It's a shame it's not as immediately accessible as say a photo album, but a handful of CD fit in most of your tiny safe deposit boxes a hell of a lot easier than a photo album.
I really do suspect we're on the cusp of having to make decisions about long term storage, and what is considered worth keeping. I myself have paid for extra storage through google, but do I really need to? No. I need to sit down and sort through the old memories and determine what's worth keeping.
To be fair, Marion called herself a hoarder. A hoarder with enough self control to choose what she horded, along with enough income to support it. She has mentioned it in a few interviews.
@@clueless_cutie Aren't there archival-grade DVDs or Blu-ray discs that are rated for over 50 years of readability? Like, yes, you will need to revisit your archived stuff at a later date and re-record it onto a new medium if you want to keep it longer-term, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. We still have functional storage media readers from 50 years ago, so we should reasonably assume that it is possible that someone who cares about being able to read their stored data will also keep a device to do so. Then you can transfer the data to a new and (hopefully) more stable form of media for the next however many decades of storage.
I am, however, still waiting for that fused quartz holographic storage media that we were promised back in, like 2009, which used light interferometry to read the tiny little voids that multiple lasers created in the storage media in order to store terabytes of data in a chip the size of my thumb. I suspect that development halted because the power of such lasers needed to perform such operations defy miniaturization.
My older brother had a huge collection of old video game magazines from the early 90s when I was a kid. One day my mom eventually convinced him of throwing them out by arguing "you can find all this info on the internet, the internet has everything". I got quite mad at the time, but could do nothing about it. And the curious thing was that a bunch of the information that were on those magazines would still take years to be easily accessible and findable on the internet, since this whole thing happened before google.
Anyway, my brother regrets it nowadays. And "the internet has everything" has been an inside joke of ours ever since when we want to complain about the state of the web.
All the information might be available, yes, but not the way it was presented and shared. :(
One of the most painful things about depression is the memory loss. Some gaps are just little bits and pieces missing, but others are whole scenes from my life blurring into little more than a vague pang of a single emotion. I’m 23, and I already mourn so many memories I can no longer reach, which are only marked by the yawning absences in my attempts to remember, physical artifacts, and others attempting to remind me of experiences we shared. I can’t even remember all of the classes I took in the college I graduated from earlier this year. I’d be a hoarder if I could, but a one bedroom apartment only fits so many decaying souvenirs and crumpled notes.
I feel this. There are just so many parts of my own life story that I simply don't remember any more, and nobody else remembers them either so they're lost forever. And that's not as horrible if it's something small, like what the impetus for me to learn how to pronounce German was (I always say it was so I could sing Rammstein songs, because it's plausible enough), but I don't remember the day I learnt I was a woman. Hell, I can't remember basic facts about the progression of my mental health which happened *this year*.
"When the weight of all that stuff is too great to drag into the future" has to be my favorite line. I've collected and bought a lot of things from my childhood, including games, movies, posters, and trading cards. It made perfect sense to me especially growing up not having certain things. I've even offered to take on items from family members with whom I shared a childhood. It feels like I'm the only one who cares about that stuff, and who else would carry that burden if I wasn't there? Without this physical/tangible item, how would anyone know we existed at that time and that we were happy in those fleeting moments? In the end, I can't help but think that I could collect everything I ever cared about, but what really matters is the moments that made me most happy.
all these moments, lost with every breath, made with every step, the tick tock stacatto of our impending demise, a fossil record as spotty as a beloved tablecloth, ending in a pile of things and atoms nobody visits, but a long shadow of thoughts that meld with those of others. we are a pattern that have occurred, and could occur again: crabs, the bikini atoll boobie
You can take pictures of some items you have and then give them up. That way you’ll have a memory of some of the stuff you can part more easily
i don't see the connection between your favorite line and your personal anecdote
This isn't just a video essay. This an academic, philosophical treatise. You could publish this in the New Yorker and it would still be the clear highlight of the issue. No one on UA-cam does it like Jacob Geller.
This is in fact just a video essay
How do you know? You can't have finished it already
You’ve just housed what a good video essay is in more academic terminology and acted like Newspapers are a big deal 💀
@RotGodKing Patrons get vids early
I haven’t even watched it yet and I know you’re right
As an immigrant who grew up in China, I know the pain, to see someone wipe out every amazing thing on the Internet. Even to this day, I still feel compelled to archive favorite news articles, UA-cam videos and TV shows. (But I encrypt them now, out of fear for copyright prosecution)
Anyways. Thank you for always making amazing video essays!
Bro is stacked 🤑
But you are right. The only way to keep a sane archive, is to once in a while, purge and condense it, and keep only the most precious parts.
@@m12735truer words have never been spoken
@@m12735 For a project like The Internet Archive, this is not possible. The best you can do is implement a storage method with better compression and deduplication algorithms. When your goal is to archive EVERYTHING, then consolidation of the digital records is not possible.
Thank you so much!
This reminds me of how I feel about all my art. I'm a writer who occasionally tries to draw her characters. And I NEVER throw out anything I've written or drawn. Sometimes I digitize it and discard the physical copy, but there is always a copy. I've had this policy since I realized I regretted throwing out everything I wrote before I was about twelve or thirteen. No matter how bad it was (and it was bad), I wanted to go back and look at it again. I wanted to remember HOW bad I was at writing back then. There was a character I wanted to salvage - and now I have to do so from memory alone.
And having all my earliest notes on my stories is sometimes useful. It can remind me where the story came from and therefore make me look at it in a new way. I saw one of my outlines in a completely new light after I reread my own notes and realized that it was inspired by the top entry on a list of cursed baby names. The main character not being able to say her own name suddenly seemed a lot less like a random quirk I threw in somewhere along the way. No, that was the foundation of the entire story. How could I have forgotten that?
i used to be so self conscious about my art (still am), but i'm so glad that i still have so much of it saved. All of the loose drawings that I drew from about age 12-14 and kept, saved in a folder and my old sketchbooks. I'm glad I still have them and I look through them pretty often. Even so, there's so much thats gone or will be gone. I used to doodle on scraps of paper during school and almost all of those are gone. My oldest sketchbooks were cheap things made from crappy paper thats fading not even a decade later and there's plenty of my old Flash animations locked in corrupted files.
Okay, this has been stuck in my head for weeks now, and I wanted to expand on a librarian's thoughts about archival loss. In library school, one of the foundational things we learn is that absolutely everything WILL be lost. We can slow that loss, we can manipulate that loss, and we can re-format. But in the end, every form of preservation will fail in the end. Furthermore, we know that we are charged with preserving the sum of human experience, an impossible task. And lastly, we know that what we chose to preserve is imbued with weight and power outsized to its original context. Even when something is preserved for being just old enough, what scraps we have become important. Cuneiform tablets complaining about Ea-Nasir's copper were not significant (necessarily), but are now treasures enough to be part of common humor in the modern era. We also have to learn what the actual cost of preservation is. The act of trying to manage a collection has real world cost: in space, in environmental control equipment, in electrical bills, in skilled labor, in periodic re-housing.... A single piece of paper over its total lifetime could cost a few hundred thousand dollars. Even the act of committing these future resources forces us to ask "is this important enough to make it worth this much?" or, "will be make this item into this level of importance?" It's inside this framework that I end up thinking about archiving not as preserving items, but as *creating* items as artefacts.
That's a fascinating take, and I'd never heard it that way before. But I guess when you know that most things won't survive, all of their significance will be pooled into the few artifacts that do. To hold that power must be a terrible, beautiful thing. Thank you for sharing. ❤
I hadn't thought of it like that, good post, and well thought out, thank you.
Wow. As someone who wants to become a librarian, this is giving me a lot to think about.
thank you for sharing that. great comment
Jacob's videos are in a special category where I feel like I can rewatch them months, or even weeks, later and still feel like I'm learning new things or making new connections from the themes and concepts in his content
no joke, for one video i have restarted it the moment i reached the end because the tone, emotions, everything, was so damn...nice to sit through
@@olive4200 yup! I'll just rewatch his stuff on long drives, especially his "fear of" stuff
Can't relate! I don't feel this way at all :D
@@spiderjerusalem8505 that’s okay!
Totally agree. I've lost count of how many times I've watched Fear of Cold. One of the best creators around, and the best essayist hands down.
I don't believe he said it in the video itself, but watching this, it felt like my turn to say "I think about this a lot." I too am a data-hoarder, and I struggle to delete basically anything unless I'm 100% certain it's a duplicate of something else I already have archived away. This video really speaks to the anxiety behind it all and explains better than I ever could why I feel so intensely about it.
Also, the quip about Wikipedia fitting into the same file-size as Metal Gear Rising really goes to show just *how much* information is cut when we document and archive it. Wikipedia can tell you a good deal about Metal Gear Rising, but if you wanted the details down to which pixel is which color on Raiden's Face? Why that would require the same amount of information as the encyclopedia of all human knowledge!
And the final bit helps me realize why, in Katamari Damacy, everyone is seemingly so happy to get rolled up. After seeing all my anxieties about the preservation of information explained so eloquently, I *really do* wish we could just bundle up the whole world and preserve it somewhere in the cosmos forever.
We can. And we will. Someday 🙃
Same
I have ADHD so that anxiety manifested in me always having dozens of tabs open all the time because otherwise I don't think I'd remember to check out the interesting thing I saw, and I know algorithms could get rid of it in just a moment.
@@hyperx72 Relatable content
@@hyperx72holy shit I feel seen
The very first video I watched from this channel, the one that introduced me to Jacob Geller, was his essay on the Library of Babel. I think about it often, about what I choose to keep and what I choose to throw away, and how impossible it is to know exactly how valuable any object or piece of art is now or several years from now.
It's a fascinating subject, and I'm happy to see it revisited.
"Digital hoarder" is exactly the right term and, if left unchecked, it's exactly what I become. I start downloading and saving every bit of music I like, every beautiful or funny image I see, desktop wallpapers that I thought were cool, all the games I've ever played, all the movies and shows I've watched, any free resource of any kind that I think might be useful to me at some point in the future, and gradually the effort of sorting and organizing all of it starts to take more and more of my time, threatening to take over my life until I say "enough is enough" and take the whole collection that I've poured so much time and effort into and just throw it away. Delete it. Delete the backup copies. Empty my computer's recycle bin. And then before long, of course, I inevitably start collecting again just out of habit. I don't know how to stop and it's (purely figuratively) killing me.
Thank you for sharing. I fall into this habit too, sometimes. It's good to know I'm not alone.
i have ADD with some features of obsessive-compulsion... i hate seeing things thrown away, and i am especially sentimental- just the other day my mother used a rag with a rose embroidered on it to wipe up an oil stain and threw it away; i grabbed it from the trash and put it into the laundry. i'm not a hoarder, no, but certain things hurt me a bit when they go, like books. when i was in jr. high, a school librarian was throwing away a lovely set of children's encyclopedias, scribbling big sharpie 'DISCARD's all over the faces of them. my sorry self grabbed all of them, piled them in a box, and took them home. i still have them. same with a windows xp pro user manual about three inches thick, a massive tome from the high school library.
I also have AD(H)D and OCD and I also have a tendency to keep all sorts of stuff, but even I have to admit that after a while, I realize I probably don't have to keep train tickets and other such junk. Not long ago I decided to throw away some of the boxes in my room, since I really wasn't using them for anything, and I couldn't resist the urge to turn at least some of that cardboard into some type of art. So I made a crab. It's still there, in my room. I still threw most of the cardboard, but at least some of it gets to live a new life as a crab. That's really the only way I can reconcile my desire to keep everything and the need to throw some of it away. It's to turn into some kind of art.
When my stress gets to be too much, I find myself cleaning out my "hoard" to gain some control, most of it I don't fret over losing, but sometimes I find myself looking for something without realizing I'd already thrown it away. It's strange how a mindset on holding on to things can change in such a short amount of time, based solely on the days feelings. What was important and held nostalgia one day, can somehow seems useless the next, only for us to seek it out again later.
I’m 22 years old (I’m not Wikipedia) and I have a constantly growing vinyl, blu-ray and CD collection for the exact reasons Jacob mentions. There’s something a lot more personal about physically owning a piece of your favourite media and being able to hold it in your hands, than feeling as though you’re only experiencing it through a fickle service owned and provided by someone else.
I'm about ten years older than you. For all my life until recently, physical media was just how you acquired games. I still own every game I brought physically in my early 20s.
It feels like a burden, not a boon. I feel like I have these CDs I'm not using, rotting slowly in the summer heat.
It feels like I'm betraying these works, somehow. They're like toys gathering bugbites, instead of being loved and enjoyed. If only someone new would play with them.
But I couldn't bear to lose them.
@@WannabeMarysue I mean if you’ll keep them properly along with the consoles maybe someone in the future will play the games. My brother in law kept his N64 and all the games he had and in that way I was able to play Mario 64 and Zelda Ocarina of Time in their original form and on the original console. The felling was… really weird, almost like I went back into the past.
That's me with games.
You can keep digital copies of all these things on your PC, you don't need physical copies in order to have a copy that can't be taken from you. It would be wise to make sure you're making backups in case a hard drive dies, but physical media can also be lost in a similar manner.
I have a CRT TV hooked up to a DVD player, VHS player and most recently a PS2. I enjoy my tapes and DVDs. I own Blu Rays, and have a healthy collection of vinyl myself. As well as a private library of books.
It's sobering, and sad, knowing that even with all I read, and watch. Even now I probably have to many things that I'll never be able to get to. I've started to donate and give away some books I acquired and know I won't read. It feels good.
I've stamped each with a personal stamp. My private library, then the town I live in. I hope some of these books travel off and find new homes.
Over the past several years I've felt myself developing hoarding tendencies. I'm not at "never throwing away literal trash" levels, but I find it almost impossible to get rid of things, digital or physical. I'm getting into CDs for the same reasons you mentioned for vinyl - Spotify is just a $10/month subscription to hear the songs they decide to keep, you never own any of it. Things feel so fragile. Watching the Wii shop and 3DS eshop close over the last few years has only enhanced this feeling. This video humanizes hoarding impulses instead of demonizing those of us who deal with it. Thank you.
I like to buy physical books of my favorite stories because I know one day Amazon and Google will take it away from me. I can't do it for games, but I can do it for movies and books, god damnit!
In the past couple of years I suddenly realized how fragile the internet is. And not just the internet, electricity itself is also something we can easily lose if things go wrong. This made me want to collect physical books, especialy the books I already read and loved, or the books I still want to read, because even if I lose the internet, my computer and my phone, even if I have to use candles or oil lamps, those books will still be available to me. Your observation about wanting to own media in a format that can't just disappear or be taken away is spot on.
Same here. I started really making an effort to buy physical copies of books, particularly history and science books through the ages. I have science books from the 1940s, world history books from the 1700s, 1800s, and 1900s. NASA's book on the science of space travel and propulsion--published more than ten years before Appllo 11. A book about the Nasi movement in America prior to WWII showing the positives and negatives of this new group. The list goes on. I'm not a professional collector either. I go to secondhand bookstores and pick things up. The old books usually cost about the same as new ones. But I see it as preserving a history of knowledge and thought. It's also humbling because it reminds me that while we think we're at the pinnacle of knowledge and science now, every historian and scientist in the past did too.
The transition from Art’s rage at the destroyed journals to the fate of your grandmother’s encyclopedias…whew, I’m weeping for family artifacts discarded decades before I was born because they held too many memories for those left behind.
One thing that's neat about this video is how different it is from some of your other work. The ideal amount of collection seems like a topic that EVERYONE has an opinion on, no matter who you ask, and it's interesting how these opinions can clash. For example, I remember my mother saving several boxes of ancient family photos from being added to a burn pile, after another family member had scanned the photos digitally and had no need for their physical counterparts anymore. Also, I don't doubt that something will totally come along and render our carefully detailed history useless, it seems like we tend to separate ourselves from historical societies too much because we are "modern," without realizing that a lot of old trends are still repeating themselves in our current world. Keep up the great vids!
In my opinion, a collection's size should be based on how much space you can effectively dedicate to it without the collection impacting your life. If you live in a small home and lack adequate storage and display space, then you need to collect digital things, small items, or have a small collection, otherwise it will impact the livability of your home.
Collections are best when the enjoyment you derive from having and appreciating your artefacts does not have to be weighed against how inconvenient it is that you own them.
Some people who have the financial ability will go one step further and build a secondary structure on their property to store and display their collection so that this doesn't become a conflict for them to consider.
When bitrot or an emp or solar flare renders the digital picture erased the hard copy saved will probably be valuable for future generations
The simultaneous beauty and downfall of people is that we can lose absolutely everything over and over again and keep going. No collection is vital.
@@M33f3r I'm still waiting for the promised sci-fi storage mediums that use, like, fused quartz and light interferometry to encode terabytes of data into a chip the size of my thumbnail. The biggest challenge then, is to ensure that there is always at least one sufficiently hardened reader for this data such that access is never completely cut off. Buried in a salt mine under the desert is probably as good as we're likely to get in regards to trying to EMP-proof our long-term archival storage.
As someone with training in archival records keeping and currently actively working in medical records digitization and retention these are so many of the questions we WISH more people would ask, and why retention processes are SO important.
No kidding, you're one of the best contemporary Pop culture writers. I hope at some point you get to publish your thoughts into an essay collection, I would gladly buy it.
Agreed!!
I was thinking the same thing!
Thank you for the lovely video. My grandparents previously passed away, and with that game going through their things. So much I kept, so much i did not know about them, despite knowing them my entire lives. She grew up desperately poor, the sharing a bathtub with her siblings using water harvested from ice on the fenceposts poor. She also kept everything she could. When she passed, her oldest son practically let me take everything I wanted. I filled my entire basement and there was still so much stuff that I couldn't take, that I knew her son would just throw away. Despite being their son, I feel like we valued totally different things. I know most of the stuff they had would be thrown away. All the casettes she ever listened to, all the jewelry he didn't want, etc. in the dumpster. Their youngest son didn't want anything. And now I feel like I have to keep her memory alive somehow. The stuff may not be valuable to him, but it's valuable to me. I think of my grandmother every single day, and Im glad I saved what I could. Though, I still had to throw much away. In stead of keeping countless numbers of her things, I keep her memory alive through my hobbies. I have her cameras, she taught me how to sew, I have her recipes, etc. The best thing I can do isn't to keep all her stuff, it's to keep her memory alive. Through me. She, and I, are more than just the stuff we choose to keep.
She wrote her history in scraps, and I was doing research on how to write a food-related memoir when she passed. I wonder how much of her knowledge I lost because it wasn't written down. And Ill never be able to ask her
With Jacob's videos, I always know when I've watched one that is going to live in my memory for so much longer than the total of the dozens of times I will watch and rewatch it. This is definitely one of those videos.
I come from a long line of hoarders. For as long as I've known, every woman on my mother's side have all been prolific hoarders. I watch as my mother is becoming one, too, and I know that I already continue that horrific tradition. I think something that could have been part of this video but understandably couldn't is about the fear of forgetting (and if he did, lol, ironic). For me, I have so much trouble letting go of things because they act as little bits of memory, where my mind fails to do it for me. I know my memory is worse than it should be for my age, and so I cling to the evidence -- the physical remnants -- of the things I've done and experienced. Without them, it feels like they would be lost to time. What are we if not our experiences? What do we become if we cannot remember them?
There was an obscure game I loved as a kid and have very fond memories of. Looking back now, the website still exists, and it may even be possible to buy a copy still... But almost all of the value the game had for me were the user-made levels, which went so far beyond the level design in the actual game, with so many weird techniques and exploits the community had discovered to make cool stuff possible. Like many game communities back then, this was all hosted on a forum, which do longer exists and certainly wasn't archived, and even if it had been, the levels were typically stored on file hosting sites that I don't think exist anymore. On the other hand, if someone had taken the time to save them all and store them somewhere for "future generations", I'm not sure I'd actually ever care to play them. It's like I just want the satisfaction that the things I loved in the past are still there somewhere, and I could go visit them if I ever wanted to.
this seems counter to the point of the video but have you actually checked the Internet archive?
I feel this a ton. I have around 80GB of old Minecraft mods and worlds saved. It turns out that outside of the most popular old versions of the game like 1.7.3b finding mods for even older versions of the game is a herculean task. Most mods back in the day used URL shorteners like adfly, almost all of which no longer exist. Around 80% of all the links I've found have been dead, link rot is real and it's slowly eating the internet that isn't the five biggest sites. I've only gotten this much because of other archival attempts online.
That is a point that is rarely brought up in conversations about preservation, but it does feel as if we do have access to everything, people's habits rarely change. Does the value of access to all media outweigh the fact that it will rarely be accessed anyway? Most things that get lost, do so for a reason.
@@JeremyForTheWin I don't think the Internet Archive downloads everything uploaded to every file sharing site
A few years ago I accidentally erased and corrupted my backup hard drive that had all my videos, pics, homemade music, documents everything! I Was so heart broken! Shattered my soul- thank god for some xanax a friend gave me because it was the most upset Ive ever been! So... turns out because catastrophic data loss has happened to me a few times in the past I was ultra paranoid and actually didn't delete my most precious music, pics, videos etc on my current in use non backup rig. I was so happy that I was able to save these hundred of hours of band rehearsals, song writing sessions, old random live shows, birthday parties etc.
But, just knowing it was saved was such a huge relief, however I don't know if I will ever actually go back and look at or use 80% of everything that was backed up at all. Cut to now and I have filled my 5TB of backup on two harddrives for redundancy. Every year I take about 10-20,000 photos (I know, fml) and probably hundreds of hours of video and It all just goes into a folder called Inbox and eventually gets separated into folders.
But I ask myself how I could ever have the capacity to view these photos.
Well i finally realized that in the near future machine learning AI will likely be able to sort through my half a million pics and videos and allow me to see the relevant ones whenever I want by reading metadata and analyzing the images I could probably search something like "show me all pics of myself and my baby together when she was 6 months old" and a sophisticated ai program could show them to me.
TLDR your comment spurned me to share my own thoughts on obsessive data storage and loss.
This man has an uncanny ability to get me engaged in any subject, no matter how weak my initial interest. I hope you never stop, Jacob.
I recently had a house fire and had insurance claim adjusters picking through and cataloguing all my belongings. It was jarring. People who’s only job was to evaluate the value of all of my possessions talking to me about artwork I had made as a teen or military medals from my brother who had passed, trying to put a monetary or sentimental value to them. It was hard, but it was an eye-opener to all of the things that were *my* history and what was just random bullshit I thought I’d use some time down the line.
Sending positive thoughts from this random dude for your swift bounce back from this, man. I know too well the impact those flames can have. Much respect for you honoring your bro - thank you for his service. Keep on truckin'.
I like the way he's holding that microphone; it was an interesting experience to watch a video essay and feel like I was being forced to watch at gunpoint.
I didn't think an essay about hoarding stuff would make me cry but here we are. Everything and everyone is a memory in the end and the only thing to do is to learn the art of letting go. Thank you, Jacob.
I've posted this on another one of your videos, and it feels relevant here, too:
"What is a man but the sum of his memories? We are the stories we live! The tales we tell ourselves!"
Maus was the first graphic novel I ever read... Actually it may the first book I ever read. I look back and can't believe my parents let me read it at six years old. I've read SO many books since then. But there are parts of Maus that are seared into my mind. The scene where he had to step onto the bodies of his friends, family and inmates to use the toilet. When my mother explained that it was things that actually happened... It shook me to my core. What I thought to be impossible was already said and done.
i had a similar experience. when i watched The Devil's Arithmetic, at a young age, i didn't get any of it. so needless to say when i asked my mom about it, and it was all true, it never left
6 years old?!?!?!??
I think the most tragic beauty of this whole subject is just how it’s a perfect showcase of how some information will just live and die with the individual that was there and knows. It’s impossible to get every bit of thought and data on something tangible for the world to see. In our pursuit to know everything there is so much we can never have, just because it decayed with the only person who had it. I feel like being consciously aware of this makes you feel like you really have some kind of power of knowing what others cannot
Being consciously aware of it has given me so much anxiety, I wish I could just not…
Oh, I think about it every single day. My mom has just legally turned 60 this year, and now that she enjoys some benefits that are exclusive for seniors, it has made me that much more aware of how she's definitely closer to her death than her birth (I could very well be as well, but, as an under 30 female that hasn't had any serious illness, that's unexpected, even in a violent country like mine; in her case, that's a *given*). Every time I look at old CDs she's kept or she puts on some music and gives some context as to why she likes or a memory she associates with it, I can't help thinking of the many nuggets of information I have attached to so much stuff that I have that may or may not be accessed by anyone else, ranging from unwritten fanfiction ideas to official documents. My aunt died unexpectedly two years ago and everyone loved her "carne louca" but now nobody knows the recipe and nobody ever will, she never wrote it down (possibly, she didn't even do the exact same thing every time, as she was very much the type to make do with whatever she had on hand at the time). I know so much will be permanently gone when my mom dies, like the carne louca recipe did when my aunt died, that I will never possibly be able to look at her things and possibly know everything that's attached to each of those items (and my mom, being a daughter of war survivor-turned hoarders, is closer to the other end of the spectrum), not to mention the things she knows that can't even be recalled by a physical object or piece of data. That's honestly almost unbearable on its own, and when I think that actually applies to every single human being? I seriously don't think the human mind was ever designed to cope with it.
Reminds me of the end of Blade Runner. "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... Time to die."
I am so happy you used specifically Bionicle instructions as a reference. The Bionicle community honestly exists in part because of the efforts of archivist sites like Biosector01 that enable new fans to find old lore that was often released piece,eat through long dead websites and story serials. We exist as a community today because people were wise enough to save this info.
Team Litestone member here.
The entire LOMN REBUILT project only exists because some higher-ups at Saffire decided that, in spite of the game's cancellation, the developers should still have the final build on CDs to remember it (in case of the beta) and because *SOMEONE* saved an otherwise random build presumably sent to LEGO (in the case of the alpha).
That alpha build might've been an insignificant change compared to the previous one, but as of now it is our ONLY playable look into a build different from that final beta build. Without it, we wouldn't know about Nobua, about the unabridged versions of the cutscenes, about the models of the levels before the beta, etc.
I do believe that LOMN has changed the way I think about retention of data, but I must admit that I've been a slight hoarder even before that.
Edit to add: There's actually also 2 counter-examples (in a way) in Bionicle media that also show what happens when old builds are or aren't retained.
Bionicle (2003), better known as Bionicle: the Game, was released and had a sequel in development, titled Bionicle: City of Legends, which got cancelled.
Last I heard, we had like 3-4(?) builds of City of Legends, and even a pitch document, but *zero* early anything for BtG. The only remnants of what that game was supposed to be at the start are in old trailers and leftovers in the release builds.
What’s the use of dedicating your life to aged children toys? Just get a job
@@sniedendepoes What's the use of being a troll? Just be polite.
@@sniedendepoes its just as ultimately useless as dedicating your life to crochet or wood carving. If it makes you feel you spent your time well and doesn't effect your life negatively why not?
@@cheesemonger6378 I you really want to get into the weeds, you could say that _everything_ is ultimately useless. This isn't a very original idea though lol.
I've already given in to the fact that everything we hold so dear will fall away. I find the old epic "Beowulf" so fascinating and endearing; both as art, and as a preserved history. Yet many of the legends and people that the characters in Beowulf refer to no longer exist in our records. The manuscript of Beowulf itself is burned in places, so near to being lost totally. I love it now, as many people loved it even only 60 years ago. Even in all my love for it I know there is nothing I can do to hold on to it. We can preserve our history best as we can, but it will all fall away. Much will be lost, and is being lost now. We can do our duty for our children, and preserve what we can, but we cannot hold onto it forever. I do not lament the other epics and the other tales that have been lost. They had their time and place for telling. I lament the many moments of people's lives that were lost in holding on to what cannot forever be maintained. We must recognize eventually that everything has it's place and time. We must enjoy it because we might be the last to be able to enjoy it.
Gosh damn that's a long comment.
I've kept every HDD, SSD & NVMe for nearly two deacdes. They contain the legacy of my gaming, my interactions online & my creations. I liken my preservation to the 90s TV show Dexter's Lab, specifically, in one episode he ventures into the areas of his lab from when he first built it and re-experiences his first forays into his obsession. Once a year, I delve back through the aptly named "Vaults" to rekindle my passion for gaming and game development. For me, I don't have the capacity to recall events without a nucleation point. I bind my many files to such nucleation sites that elicit a memory, an emotion, a desire. My hoard is my minds way to index my memories.
That's a brilliant way to describe the experience of digital cataloguing in the modern era. Thank you for sharing.
My parents were refugees from the Hmong Secret War, leaving Laos through the Mekong river towards Cambodia and Thailand. This really helped me understand my parents and why they hold so many things. But when they came over to the States they were also understood on when to let go, and as you said, keep the most sentimental things. I definitely learned my hoarding from them.
Is it hoarding?
@@the_jjabberwock Rethinking it, it's not really hoarding for me, I just need to reorganize it.
Jacob this was sincerely, one of, if not your best essays. Several moments really got to me. How you are able to weave so many stories into a topic is so impressive. I ALWAYS walk away from your videos with more between my ears than when I started watching it. Thank you.
I think the thing that a lot of your videos do to me, the fear of videos in particular, is impart me with a vast, unassailable sense of scale. I often find myself breaking down into tears as you describe just the vast incomprehensible scope of well, anything really. It's not just a sense that things are big and exist but the sense that these giant, unbelievable things exist in the same world, the same space that I do. That I can and do interact with them daily without even really fully grasping what they are, and that even at these unfathomable scales humans can and do have an effect on them. It's a feeling that I don't think any other documentaries or essays I've watched really drives in this effectively. It feels like eldritch knowledge almost, to be told so effectively just how much there is that I do not and likely will not understand in my lifetime. I will never experience the temperatures described in the Fear of Cold documentary for example and I don't think any movie or game or book could really ever have conveyed it to me in the way your narration and writing does, by the end I was struck with this same sense of scale I describe here, not that the cold is big in the traditional sense, but that it's something I cannot possibly comprehend now in my limited experience, and the feeling that hearing this I do not want to. I'm kind of rambling now, I don't really know if this even makes much sense, I'm typing it through tears. I'm not even sure why, the scale of human knowledge, and the ease of which it can be destroyed got to me I guess. Thank you for your videos, they're really something else.
You've put into words almost exactly what I've been thinking, Thank you for sharing.
This, exactly this.
Yeah, there is just too much data to simply be deleted one day, right? Millions, no, billions of people have put their time and effort into making all of this information and each day an enormous part of it just… disappears…
What was bro cooking?
you put my thoughts on the subject into words really well. thank you dearly for your comment.
when I was thirteen I used to find my favorite fanfiction online and handwrite it all down in a notebook in case it was ever deleted, I now have more reasonably been keeping a thumb drive of downloads
Wow, me too!
i think my favorite part of this video was that when you referred to the collection of syrup containers as a horde, my immediate reaction was to go "no????" i think that little items like that can tell us loads about what aesthetics were popular throughout history, and about what art trends filter out to the public and WHY those trends are mass marketed for public consumption and why others aren't. that can tell us about politics, and the availability/popularity of certain resources, and so much other stuff. all in a syrup container. i guess it just goes back to value being subjective. this was an excellent video as always, probably one of my all time faves.
This video hit pretty close to home for me for a strange reason. Growing up, my grandfather was (and still is) a storage hunter (that TV show storage wars? Yeah he does that). From the age of 6-7 till about the age of 19 I’d go out every weekend and help him clean up his shop and unload storage units he’d bought. A lot of the stuff he’d sell like tools, furniture, collectibles. He’d collect a lot of toys and lunchboxes from the 30s-60s cus they sold well but what always stuck out to me even now at 23 years old is the amount of “stuff” we’d just throw away. I remember specifically we unloaded a storage unit out in Wyoming in a town with a population less then 100 and in that storage unit was just garbage bags and rat shit. Inside those garbage bags though was clothes and family photos. Just folders and folders of family photos and journals from people who were long since dead and had long since abandoned the storage unit. We threw everything in that storage unit away. As impressive as something like Wikipedia and the internet archive is, it still can’t truly capture EVERYTHING. One of the most interesting things we ever found was a collection of TIME magazines from WW2. The pages were literally falling apart and the amount of cigarette ads was insane. I ended up giving them to a history teacher I had in high school and I’ve never seen them since. Sorry for the long ass comment! Topics like this always spark a sense of nostalgia in me and I tend to go on rants. Great video and I look forward to the next!
I have strong hoarding tendencies (that I keep in check with strict rules) but I'll never forget what a friend once said to me. She said "You're not a hoarder, you only keep what you can use. Your just capable of a lot more than most people." Apart from being very flattering, I think that gets at the core of what happens to those "problematic hoarders". If you watch them you see that they have very specific reasons for each item. Even if they can't articulate it, you can see in their faces that they're searching for a purpose. I believe that deep down some of them are ether overly creative or highly pragmatic people that let their dreams and projects get out of control. If I didn't have a bin for all of the pens that I refuse to throw away, and it wasn't next to the 300 other bins for everything else, all following Adam Savage's clear tote/shelf first order retrieval philosophy, then yea.. I would be buried under rubble.
I've been rewatching some video essays recently and i gotta say, the growth that this guy has shown in a short 5-ish years of making art and art critism is truly astounding.
And that's not to discount his earlier stuff, because there's a lot of thought provoking and wonderful analysis there, but just... wow. Keep it up❤
Everytime I watch one of your videos I feel like I become a better, more thoughtful person. I sit down thinking I'll watch the first few minutes and suddenly the video is ending, then 20 minutes pass in a daze while I think about all the ideas presented. I know internet comments don't tend to mean much (especially the positive ones) but thank you so much for everything you do.
Every comment on this video will be immortalized one way or another
If only becoming a better person was as simple as sitting in front of a screen.
@@noneofyourbusiness4616 You're absolutely right, my comment was oversimplified. Progress comes from countless hours of self reflection and more importantly, putting our ideas into action. Though media such as this video, along with books and the ideas of people we meet can impact and inspire us to grow, we ultimately must enact those changes ourselves. Thank you for allowing me to think more deeply about what I said, and I hope you have a great day!
You know when you kind of just know that someone is deeply smarter than you in some profound way and you kind of sit in awe of them as they do what they do? That is how Jacob makes me feel when producing videos like these. Just a masterclass in taking complex topics you may have had in your head and then analyzing them in ways you might not have ever done yourself.
23:23 as a certified Zoomer, musician, someone who listens to digital music exclusively on UA-cam, and record collector, you basically nailed the biggest reason why I collect records. I love stumbling upon uploads of obscure Japanese funk fusion albums in my recommended UA-cam videos that don't exist on major streaming platforms, I listen to a lot of those. There have been several times the channels those albums were uploaded from just disappear or remove those videos. I've come to realize that if I really like an album of ANY genre I NEED a physical version, especially since music is such a large part of my identity. Whenever I pass down my records to my kids and I pass away, the curated collection of records will be part of my legacy, who I am, what I enjoyed, when I enjoyed those things, etc. Idk, I get real sentimental about preserving parts of myself for me to remember in later years or for loved ones to do so, and everything being digital scares me
Beautifully crafted as usual. To add onto what you mentioned about your grandmother holding onto things that we perceive to have no value and the story of Maus itself is that the era they grew up in absolutely molded the habit of holding onto whatever they possibly could. I normally don’t read historical books and focus on fictional, but I’ve recently read several on the Great Depression. I’ve also spoken with several people who lived through it, notably including my own grandmother. Jacob is absolutely right in that some of these people who had nothing, or in the case of people who lived through the holocaust, were denied everything, go on to collect everything they can, because who knows when it might be useful. I grew up in Missouri, although I don’t live there now. Last year I went back for a summer between semesters of college and was able to be around my grandma for quite a bit. She lived through the tail end of the Great Depression and was always holding onto everything. She moved into a smaller home recently and had to get rid of so much stuff she had held onto for years. What happened was quite similar to Jacob’s story in that we found a lot of things that held real value. Some war medals my grandfather earned and his old Marines uniform, my dad’s high school jersey and varsity jacket, among other things. She was even kind enough to pass on some things to me to remember my grandfather. I have a shell from his 21 gun salute and my dad’s basketball jersey. They’re small things, but I am a bit eclectic, so I love them dearly. It just really means a lot to me to have some of this stuff, and this video reminded me of it.
when my grandfather died, my dad was the executor and pretty much just had us loot his apartment for anything we wanted to keep and gave everything else to goodwill. it was a very surreal experience, looking through the home of a man i barely got to know and only had a few memories of. some of the things i ended up taking were actually gifts that my dad had given him, haha.
my brother took his journal and i'm not really sure what happened to it.
I love this video so much! I have lost a lot of things over the years. My own personal "archive" is my art. I have tried to keep everything that I drew from the age of 15. I lost a lot from a house fire that happened, the pages I do have smell like the fire still. I got out of a traumatic situation and lost a lot of my digital art. I've lost so much of my digital art, but some were were still preserved on websites where I downloaded it to my laptop. My fondness for my growth as an artist. My fondness for bad scribbles and half finished projects, sketchbooks that have water damage. I love looking back to see ideas that never came to fruition or funny sketches that I drew. Almost frozen states of memories of good and bad times that I cannot bear to part with. I worry that there will be a time where I can no longer see the sketches as they are not on archival paper or with materials that do degrade because they were not made for that. I know my horde is for me. I do not plan on having kids and I would want to put that on them, so instead I am painting pieces for my family. When I go, burn it with me so it can be apart of me as it were in life.
When you talked about Maus and your grandmother I couldn’t help but think back to stories my mom told me about my great grandmother would hoard non perishable food. My great grandmother that escaped Soviet East Germany with her daughter after dodging Nazi’s and surviving WW2 as a Romani woman. I knew that was the reason she did that in the back of my mind but never thought so deeply about it until this video.
Oh my god I connect with this so much. I constantly fiddle around with the data on my computer like a madman. There really is this horror that the things that you like, spent time making, or resources you use will no longer exist. Preservation is often, emotionally, the rejection of loss. I'll admit, I keep records of my UA-cam liked videos and subscriptions, save every single college resource and lecture notes that I can, and download the online books that I read. There are not that many feeling worse than the feeling of losing something that was important, and realizing that things are never going to go back to what they were.
And can I mention how addictive collection data is. I wold not say I am a hardcore hoarder, but the kinds of problems that you need to solve to collect data are interesting. How do I scrap this website for the correct data? What services can I use to collect my data in this database? And something you just download it easily. And the reward is something real (as real as data is). You now own that thing, which feels great. It's also kinda weird, because why would you feel good about having something that you already have?
I wonder, if there were a repository of all the things that you wanted to save, and it were completely safe, no chance of it going down, would we still back up things locally. Is there a feeling of ownership to having a local copy of something, or is protection the only component to hoarding data? Probably both.
I love that 1TB can now fit on a literal thumbnail and I wonder how much further we can push miniturization of data storage. I'm currently on 3.2TB of storage amassed over about a decade but my data growth is accelerating to the point I forecast to fill my 4TB 2.5 inch usb external harddrive. This will be an important moment bc currently 4TB is the largest capacity that is sold in this form factor, my data storage solution will have to increase in size.
I guess the point is that, in the end...
It's a pointless task, no ammount of saving will ever survive the pass of time, and more often than not, it might even overwhelm us, "its weight too heavy to bear".
Maybe it's better to let most of it go up into a star...keep what you feel the most close to and that's it
@@RedstoneNinja99 btw if it isnt backed up, it doesnt exist
@@alessandromorelli5866 Just because a task is technically not possible to complete, doesn't mean that getting closer isn't valuable.
@@somdudewillson valuable in what sense?
It will get destroyed in no time, specially something like a ssd or hdd, giving it longer than 30 years is wishful thinking
It's weird, but the obsession to hoard everything may seem manic in the present, but even small bits of it become treasures due to their scarcity in the future. Letters written between friends and lovers were usually burned after their death, but the few that survive tell us so much about the concerns and minor happenings of their days, and show a different side of the peoples' lives than the proper history books might have recorded. On a grander scale, encyclopedias and histories are usually written by the winners of war/the political elite, to the detriment of those deemed unworthy of remembering. There are so many stories, languages, skills and songs from slaves and peasants that we only realize now have been lost. I realized that some popular versions of songs I grew up with are just outright missing from UA-cam... these things will just be gone once the last person who remembers them has died.
Somehow, Jacob always manages to give me a new form of existential dread in his videos
I always enjoy Jacob's videos for the compelling story they tell. But this is the first one that really connects to me personally. Archiving, preserving, hoarding, whatever it is, has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. It is especially relevant to me right now, as I'm moving for the first time in years and need to decide what things to get rid of. And I've noticed that I find it a lot easier to throw things away than I used to.
But I never delete digital data. Not even files that I really don't want to think about let alone have a look at (say, a copy of a cringe inducing chat log from when I was a teenager). I want to keep it all. Whenever something I loved gets deleted off the internet, I am annoyed at myself that I didn't think of saving it. And I would never throw away a physical item without first taking a picture of it, to preserve the fact that it once existed. I would never delete data, better to just buy a new hard drive. Perhaps I crave the certainty of knowing that things won't just disappear over night. I don't know, but it's a part of me.
Also, I literally havea copy of Wikipedia (text only) downloaded and stored in a folder called "all the knowledge in the world" so that segment was particularly funny to me.
This video hit a certain spot for me. Coming from a family where my grandparents had nothing due to WWII, living in the soviet union, and just the general lack of abundance most of us watching this video take for granted. I come from a family of hoarders, and seeing how that was passed down to my father, and then down to me, contrasted with your desire for a more physically minimalist environment in response to your own families coping mechanism, was fascinating to think about. how we are all shaped as a result of experiences our descendants had in completely different worlds from our own. Your video gave me a lot to think about, thank you.
Would you ever consider putting some of your content on a podcast platform? I want to be able to listen to these offline on loop without downloading 8 hours of video files haha. Love every video you’ve made!! Truly makes me ponder every time
pretty different to his usual content, he DOES have a podcast called “something rotten”, it’s more centered around games and he has a lot of guest speakers on, but it’s still worth checking out imo, even if it’s a different format
I had the feeling described at the start once. Many years ago there was an Alpha-run for an RTS called something like "Conflict of nations", it was a pretty simple team-RTS where you had one hero unit which decided what other regular units you could pick. It was like a mix of a MOBA and an RTS. I liked it a lot and looked forward to a full release after the alpha closed again.
It took many years, and when the Open Beta arrived the game had been entirely reworked, and was now an almost entirely normal MOBA. I still mourn the loss of that amazing game that I played for a few short days
I'm not afraid to say that the very brief mention of Katamari at the very end made me tear up a little bit. I wasn't expecting it to be mentioned, much like how the beginning of this video had me thinking about Doublefine's Psychodessey only a few moments before clips of it were on the screen, but in hindsight it makes so much sense.
God where do I even start with how satisfying this video is. I'm so glad you brought up the collection or "hoarding" of traumatised grandparents (mine are from different countries in the Mediterannean that both had to flee for safety and/or better lives that didn't include poverty) and how that's transferred to their children, my mother specifically, and then her children. We all swing between "we dont need it, it's served its purpose and renting means you need to always be packing light" to "this has value to me and possibly to someone else". A classic example is my mum and dad recorded a double feature on VHS of Rocky Horror and Blues Brothers in the 80s, with BB including a scene I've never seen in tv airings or streaming since (for anyone wondering, don't ask me what it is because I can't remember, but she still has it). I've been asking my mum for a very rare bootleg of a certain song that I've had in my head on-and-off for about two years now because THAT particular version with beautiful group singing and leads is completely non-existent online.
I even have a memento box and have starting journaling (and always forgetting to write in it) because when The Depression hits and I try to remember what I've done in years prior, I can't remember if I've done anything. It has no value outside me and possibly my family when I die.
My grandpa right now is dying of leukemia, and a stroke years ago has made his short-term memory and behaviour a sketchy thing. I ask him everything I can now about what he remembers about his life and what he knows; his native language, recipies, what his family would do with the macadamias around their house, why he has a certain number of empty bottles outside, what are in the boxes taking up the room next to the kitchen....
Anyway, this as always was a great video and a bit chef's kiss to talking about saving all the previous saves on a project, on documenting, and all the other little things (sorry my cat is yelling at me so I need to wrap this up) ♥
I love that this video seems so cohesive so amazingly made that it feels like your watching a mad scientist at work attempting to discover, no tear apart this mystery, the way it builds up from the beginning the meta commentary in the second third of the video its just so amazing
As a trans woman, this video hits me really. hard. I've been transitioning for 5 years now, and one question, more than any other keeps coming up. "Do I keep this?" From choosing a new wardrobe, aspects of my own identity, and even parts of my own body. In a way, going back through the pieces of my previous life, trying to figure out the answers to that question, has helped me find greater comfort in myself. The person I am now is an evolution and refinement of my previous self. I've gotten rid of the things that held me back, and I've held onto the things that made me strong.
I guess ultimately what I'm trying to say is, no one can grow by holding onto the past, but that past can still hold significant meaning to who we are today.
You're in a cult
@@sweetypuss most people in these comments are sharing personal stories why are you not also harassing them
@@sweetypussit's natural to relate to material by drawing parallels with your own life. The real question is why did you feel like your comment was worth making. Especially if you already felt that their comment was off topic.
(Don't bother answering, we all know why.)
@@yesterdayseyesWow it must be the most powerful cult, if it spans through out the entirety of human existence, from history to cultures and countries. It's almost as if human existence is more vast and intricate then the binary of 0 or 1, black or white. Stay watching Jacob's videos maybe you'll realise curiosity and empathy are better for you than disgust and hatred towards the unfamiliar.
"sometimes the past paves the way for the future, and sometimes the future is held back by the past. The trick is knowing which is which."
Can't believe being a Brazillian, understanding NATIVELY the lyrics to the last song I.... can't pinpoint it. I'm for longer than five minutes searching snippets of it and finding different songs. I don't think it happenned to me before. This video made me cry when you talked about Maus. Work of art. You're so talented.
Multiple times, I’ve considered going through all my stuff and tossing things away. About five months ago, I actually moved from my grandmothers and had to go through all my stuff to see what I want and what I want to get rid of. Strangely enough, I had a hard time biting the bullet of tossing away even the most minute of trinkets; Old shirts I haven’t worn since I was 16, art supplies during my time at college, a Big Daddy figurine from Toys R US my uncle got me for my birthday that has been untouched in storage for so long that the packaging itself began to yellow (has to be at least worth 150 bucks thanks to the damage).
Some of the stuff I’m most hesitant to toss away have a sentimental value to me; the ticket I got when I went to my first baseball game with my mom and her partner, a shirt I wore while jumping through a sparkler fountain on the 4th of July, old drawings I did with and for my best friend before we had our falling out, the tag I wore when I went to visit my grandfather as he began to die from COVID-19…
The joke I like to make is that I’m a hoarder of memories, holding on to things that remind me of good or bad times in my life. It’s like it’s evidence that I experienced these moments, to remind me of how much my life has changed as I was growing up. The mere idea that tossing any of these things away, whether I had a use for them or not, feels like tossing away parts of myself. If these things were thrown in the trash or given away to somebody else, did they even exist? Did what they represent ever matter, these parts of our history that has done nothing but sat in the corners of our rooms and our memory gathering dust?
I am actually watching this as I paint my assignment for my art class. A series of paintings of libraries through time, actually, and a somewhat convoluted commentary on the ways that we view history where sometimes, the means itself of keeping information can be just as valuable as the information. So this feels very, incidentally, fitting. Thank you for your video Jacob, your perspective on the world (and media) is always fascinating.
I know you get a lot of comments, but this video really struck a chord with me. My grandparents had a ps2 when i was younger, i played with it every time i visited for hours. They have long since donated it, my favorite game? Katamari Damacy i would roll around for hours picking up all i could, never got really far but oh well. I never knew how much that game stuck with me until the ending. I keep the most random things if it can remind me of something or someone i loved. Im going around life, picking up all the experiences and fragments of reality and data i can. Wonderful video thank you Jacob.
As someone whose grandmother grew up as russian/polish in 1930s Germany, her experience was never something she talked about, and, in many ways, I have always felt that much of my culture and heritage were stolen from me because of my grandmothers inability to talk about it. However, after seeing this, it has completely recontexualized how I see that, and I greatly appreciate you for that.
I work as a librarian, and people bring their donated books to us all the time. When we can't take them all, people will try to convince us of why THIS book has value, actually, regardless of its miserable condition, and this video makes me think of those stories. Trying to determine the inherent value of any specific piece of information is impossible, it's always relative, and sometimes I worry that I'm turning away an old book that was once mass-produced and now will never be seen again.
Really exceptional video, cuts right to the heart of so many conversations we have in library and archival spaces, and it makes sense that there's no clear solution when this is such a deeply complicated problem.
I truly think videos like these are some of the best artistic creations the internet has ever enabled. Such engaging, meditative, reflective thought conveys so much emotion and personality. Much love!
4:40 I have to imagine that, in the 40s and 50s, those silent films were less accessible to movie buffs than they are today. Part of the reason so many silent films are accessible today is that many of them are now public domain, and another part of that is that the rights holders of the few that still are under copyright protections simply don't care enough to keep them off of online services that cater to them.
Mr. Geller, every time I watch one of your videos it absolutely floors me. I tear up or cry in reaction to most of your work. Video essays have a connotation on this platform as something analytical, logical. Sterile. I like those more detached videos, I really do, but what makes your content truly special is that, like most of those other videos its well researched and its analytical, but always also profound, emotional, and deeply sentimental. Your prose is poetic and your ability to wrap multiple ideas into an emotional idea that is singular to the theme of a video astounds me. Your sentimentality and personality oozes through your script in a way only one other essayist, Noah Gervais, can manage. I do not know how you do it, and I want to thank you for in every video managing to say the right words to procure a response from my deepest emotions.
Working at a large-ish tech company starting as an early employee, I have lots of old “pull requests” I can point to when people ask questions about why we did X or why didn’t we consider Y. These decisions happen countless times, but few of them are hugely consequential. When they are consequential, they usually do get “lost” at least in the mindshare of the employees of the company. This gets worse as time goes on and the people who were “in the room” when a decision was made leave the company or simply forget. Some people have told me that I have a tendency of bringing up “old grudges” and for a while I took this feedback to heart. But reflecting on this more recently I’m leaning in to this habit and reframing it as a history lesson, rather than “I told you so” or something. Thanks for making this video; it’s incredible how much knowledge and wisdom is lost to the simple failure of most humans to appreciate the value of detailed historical context.
Your story about your grandmother helped me feel a bit closer to my own grandmother and her side of the family that I will probably never get to know. Thank you.
I’m genuinely fascinated by how you manage to somehow change my perspective on life with almost every essay. Adding nuance, critiquing, and bribing new light to things I haven’t thought about in years. I’ve watched your content for a long time and I think it’s incredible that with every video you manage to say something I’ve just never thought about in that way before.
Thank you for this. I'm also someone who loves archives, both conceptually and creating them myself. I've started (never finished) so many random archives in my life -- words I've invented in an A-Z address book, cocktails my friend made me and how I rated them, made up spells that mean nothing but just look cool on a page. And not to mention me trying to learn all that there is about Humongous Entertainment from the devs, before they fully forget the details. All this is to say: I relate.
I've been having such a great time watching through your videos in no particular order. Very glad I've found your channel, you talk about almost all my favorite concepts that are hard to articulate, and you do so brilliantly!! :D
The ending of this video makes me cry like a baby literally every time
Man this was beautiful. The reference to Maus triggered a mental connection to reading Man’s Search for Meaning in high school. Wondering how it would hit me now and reserved a copy at my library. Thanks for making this!!
when you introduced the topic at the beginning of the video, i immediately thought of marion. i was so pleasantly surprised when you brought up not only her work, but how her collecting impacted her life. she had good reason to document what she did, especially after what she experienced as an activist. the same goes for vladek, your grandmother, and many others... i believe we all collect/throw away according to our personal history, the world around us, and how we frame things in our minds. describing it as rolling the world up and turning it into one of many stars in the sky is... comforting.
Jacob, this was an amazing video, and it couldn't come at a more appropriate time too! I'm just getting out of a six year long relationship, leaving a town that I'd spent the last three years of my life at. If anything? The idea of keeping things and throwing them away or wanting to revisit things previously thrown away has been obsessively on my mind and I guess this video helps with putting it all into perspective. Keep up the good work
I don't have an overly long analysis or introspective thought raised by this time's video. A fear I've always had is the fear of being forgotten, and a fear that has been plaguing my mind recently is the event of a YIIK or a loss of information and media as we know it.
The way you lay it all out in here actually makes me incredibly existential and contemplative and all I can say is that I really needed that ad read at the end to snap me back to earth and remind me it's alright for now, and that I really need to shave.
Whenever I have a dissociative episode, I have this habit of watching Jacob Geller videos to help calm me down. I know that sounds strange, given the content of much of his work, but he’s so empathetic and calming I really can’t help it, so thanks for that, man.
Jacob, this was great as always!
A note on why companies might keep anything in digital form: in some countries there is legal obligations to do so for 10 or even 20 years. That means every document that leads up to a sales contract. And who can be bothered to sort that stuff and just keep the one version presented to that one customer? Nobody, everyone's got more important stuff to do. So that's how that comes to be...
I haven't watched a lot of your videos, but each one I've seen has blown my mind. I always think wow, what a well-read individual. What a calming voice and demeanour. What beautiful editing and pacing... And what incredibly well thought out points.
This video in particular speaks to me in ways you may not have intended.
I hoard. I know I hoard. When I was young, my parents warned me about how I'm eventually gonna have a house that looks like it's from the TV show Hoarders (I hate everything on TLC, but that's a tangent). And, honestly, they're almost right. I have rules about what I keep- no food trash, nothing that will attract bugs, nothing moldy or disease-carrying etc- but I refuse to throw away old papers, or anything I've had longer than two years, anything with memories attached to it (even if broken). I keep broken electronics and revisit old cellphones every year. I buy flash drives when my laptop runs out of storage; I keep old alpha versions of a game that I have long since decided I hate now, but loved when I was 14, I have the N64 emulator for games that I can now play on my switch, I have every song I've ever downloaded on multiple different pieces of equipment... and I have a massive collection of plastic bags, which lives in my bedroom. I'm gonna use them for a project one day, but right now, it's a growing pile of trash bags, ziplock bags, bread bags, grocery bags, bubble wrap, mail bags, item packaging, really any plastic bags I can get my hands on will stay either in my room at the foot of my bed or on the floor in the backseat of my car. I also keep straws, to a lesser extent. Nobody but me will ever find value in any of them. I'm the only person I know whose default response to a plastic bag is "that'll last forever! I'd better find a use for it someday!" And I know it's strange. Why wouldn't I throw these away? Most of them were fished out of the trash, where they were designed to be sent to live for eternity. A sensible person would leave them there... but I didn't.
I appreciate that this video doesn't have a call to action. It's just food for thought. A moment to consider what's valuable to us, why we have it, what it means, what memories they carry. You didn't tell us to throw away our collections. You didn't tell us to collect more. You didn't shame anyone for having a collection, or a hoard, and you didn't shame anyone for lacking one. It was simply a discussion of the emotional or intellectual value one person or another might attach to them. I think that's beautiful.
Your videos never fail to make me feel small. Please continue.
I'm always amazed at the way I can see reflections of the core thesis of your video in my own life through different perspectives.
I like shooting photos. Film photos, digital photos, instant photos even. Much to the consternation of my brother I barely share them. They sit in a hard drive taking up ever increasing amounts of space as the resolution of my cameras has gotten better and maybe I'll pick out one or two and put them on Instagram or something. But most of the photos? Most of them I've taken for myself.
Or more accurately I've taken them in the hopes that someday in the future a relative or some sort of digital archaeologist will get to be a voyeur into my life. In the same way people share photos of their parents in the '70s, I want someone to be able to share photo of me and say "look, This is what a normal person was in 2020. Back before we had the food wars" or something.
And so there sits, a terabyte or more worth of JPEGs and raw photos just collecting stray bits.