A few weeks ago, my daughter was visiting for the weekend and asked if she could AirDrop me a photo from her phone. I said sure, even though I wasn’t entirely clear on what AirDrop meant.
She picked up my phone to check something on my end, and that’s when her face changed.
“Mom. You have over fourteen thousand photos on here.”
I told her I knew that. I didn’t, actually. I knew there were a lot, but fourteen thousand sounded like a different kind of problem.
She started scrolling. Screenshots of recipes I never made. Blurry pictures of nothing. Forty-seven almost identical shots of her nephew at the same birthday party. Photos I’d already printed years ago.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it, the only digital copies of pictures from my mother’s 80th birthday.
She handed my phone back and said, “Mom, how would anyone ever find anything in here?”
She was laughing when she said it. But after she left that evening, I kept thinking about it.
Because she was right. If anyone ever needed to find something on my phone, in my email, or in any of the accounts I use every day, they wouldn’t know where to start. I’m not even sure I would.
I had spent the last year decluttering my entire house. Every closet, every cabinet, every drawer. My home finally felt calm and intentional.
But my phone? My email? My passwords written on a sticky note in the kitchen drawer? The subscriptions I forgot I was paying for?
None of that had been touched.
That’s when I started looking into something called digital death cleaning. I thought I was done decluttering. Turns out I hadn’t even started the part that might matter the most.