Minimalist Datahoarder Contradiction

How Datahoarding and Minimalism go together.

For those of you that scrolled through my shitpost blog,
you might already know that I like to live a minimalist lifestyle
and I’m also a self-proclaimed datahoarder,
who collects terrabytes of stuff on a homeserver.

That does sound like a contradiction, doesn’t it?
How do those two go together?
If I want to embrace minimalism,
why am I hoarding so much stuff on hard drives?
Shouldn’t I practice digital minimalism
to free myself from the digital clutter?

Well there’s fine distinction to make here,
which explains why datahoarding and minimalism go together quite well.

Let me explain….

I like visual and mental minimalism. Visual is obvious. Cleaner surfaces, less clutter, not much to clean, open spaces, no materialism, frugal living, not buying stupid shit, and so on and so on and so on.
Data doesn’t take up physical space. So we are good with this one.
Let’s move on…
But with the mental minimalism, the one that helps to clear your mind,
there’s difference on how to approach this.

Some may say you should reduce digital clutter and data
to free up headspace, clear your mind and have less distractions.
But I beg to differ.
While digital minimalism may work for some people
and helps them to stop waisting time on instagram and
having a zero email inbox, I have a different proposal.

First of Apps, Tools, Organizers, Calendars
or better yet the internet as a whole, just is so convenient.
You can be much more productive and much more efficient if you use your smartphone and computer as a tool to organize and manage your life.
So I don’t know why some people on reddit think going back to a flip-phone is the holy grail of digital minimalism. It just makes your life unecessary complicated, hard and tedious.

But that’s another story.

I wanted to elaborate more on my datahoarding and how it is still a minimalistic lifestyle. I have a lot of data, but all my files are categorized, organized, indexed and remotely accessible. If I need to check something I can find it instantly with my phone. This goes for work contract, or my latest eletricity bill or even my 4th grade school certificate. Photos, Videos, Projects, Code I wrote 5 years ago, that random meme I photoshoped in 2013, … You name it. I have everything in my digital vault and I can find and access it instantly on my phone from everywhere in the world.
This makes life just so much more easy and conveniant.

I also live entirely paperless. Everything is digital. It’s super efficient.

And if it makes my life easier, I don’t want to declutter and go all minimalistic on my hoard. Why would I? Hard Drives are relatively cheap.

But that’s not all. Besides it beeing awesome to have instant access to all my data all the time, I also have a place to dump my notes, tasks, project plans, reminders and random files into my productivity systems and in my archive.
I can write down and archive every thought I want to remember and can tag it and archive it for later.

It frees up so much mental space and clears the mind.

In this case you can actually say … Sometimes MORE IS LESS

And this is why datahoarding and minimalism can go together

have a pleasent weekend everybody