Should we delete old text messages?
Private conversations or private correspondences?
Painful memories
Ed Sheeran’s recent song Old Phone captures the "overwhelming sadness” of being confronted with one’s old phone and text messages that were “best left in the past where they belong”.
In moments of strength, one can feel that all archiving and recordkeeping is important. Even in the song, one may feel that Ed should
“Exes”, “dead friends” - are ultimately things to mourn and then move on from. While there might be some cognitive benefits to records that allow us to confront what actually happened so we remember what we need to heal from, this sort of perfectionism in healing might be counterproductive. Ultimately, our brain keeps enough and maybe too much of a record of our trauma, and keeping even more or subjecting ourselves to it again may be too much.
Regret
“Nothing good will come from regretting”.
Remembering our past is important because it forms our story. We live in response to things that have happened to us, and in particular to the things out of those that we choose to make a big deal about.
We cannot live in response to everything in our past, lest we become “burdened by history” - as Nietzsche characterises one of the possible abuses of history.
We don’t need to remember everything about our own lives.
Regret is only useful to the extent we use it learn and move on. Replaying the same negative emotions again and again is like reopening a wound that has healed.
Nostalgia
A strong character or someone looking back at happier conversations might not worry so much. It could be a joy to revisit one’s past life and feel the energies of another time.
Innocence
Sometimes our past selves are to be learnt from. Their innocence and dreaming spirit could be something we have lost.
My verdict
How we manage our text messages is not that different from how we manage memories in our brain.
We spend our lives trying to remember things and remind people of things by guiding our attention and the attention of others. We try to remember and make a bigger deal of more important things.
On the other hand, some memories linger in our minds without intentional efforts. These gradually fade, but can suddenly rise to the surface.
What’s unfortunate is that the manner in which memories linger on phones is unnatural to the human brain. If someone remembers something very old that we have forgotten, we typically read some significance into that - like the fact they care a lot about us to remember all these small things about us. Our phones indiscriminately store lots of our past text conversations.
Ideas:
If there are text conversations that we want to remember, we can deliberately make them worth remembering, and we can deliberately hold on to them. It is important to do the thing itself well to make the records of it better.
There are features to delete messages after some time has passed. This is a bit unnatural as well in the fact that it deletes all messages after a certain date. Maybe we could make a more natural fading of old messages using LLM powered tools. The LLM could identify which chats seem more significant and just hold them around, while deleting other messages. There could be some randomness and time weighting in this algorithm. This might sound strange, but it is functionally similar to the intelligent logic that powers the “memories” feature in photo apps that randomly shows you nice photos from the past.
Write more letters, voice notes and emails, text less. These longer more thoughtful media are more ultimately more efficient less stressy and more edited so often more worth preserving. Letters and emails can be written not just to be read instantly but for posterity.