What Really is the Price of a Memory?

An EU student texts their friends while chatting over dinner. (PC: Ian Murphy)

About twice a year, I carefully reorganize my iPhone’s home screen—a kind of digital feng shui to make me feel more balanced and organized. Apps are shoved into folders, grouped by usefulness or similarity.

Widgets display my packed calendar, incomplete habit goals, hastily jotted notes, and Duo from Duolingo glaring at me for my absence. I feel strongly that my digital folders and widgets represent what is mine: my photos, my games, my saved articles, my daily progress.

I was talking to a friend about phone storage. Mine was running out. I needed more space to keep my photos, to pay to keep my memories.

I had about 5,000 pictures and laughed at the absurdity of it. Mostly screenshots, or reminders to myself. Then she told me her number: 44,000 pictures. 14,000 of them were her cats.

We have always been obsessed with remembering, with preserving our own memory: streets named after influential figures, monuments carved in stone, memoirs and journals, song lyrics, a flag on the moon. The assurance of a legacy makes death feel less final. We will not be forgotten; neither will my friend’s two cats.

I worry that in this new age of digital hoarding— one where we aren’t forced to confront physical clutter, no photographs spilling off tables or folders falling apart—we’re at a disadvantage. My hoard is hidden, weightless, and easy to ignore.

With all the care and personalization I put into my phone screens, I wonder: Is it really mine?

Our online data is not permanent. Internal hard drives fail, files corrupt, cyberattacks happen, and companies go bankrupt, threatening to erase our precious memories in an instant. Mistakes happen as well—my mom forgetting all of her passwords for the fifth time.

The Leader reporter Ashley Vanderhoff’s friend’s cat.

In 2023, Sony announced they would delete Discovery Channel content from every PlayStation library, forever erasing content people had paid for. After public outrage, they reversed the decision and extended licensing, but what happens when corporations decide that our purchased content or memories aren’t worth keeping?

In my basement, a dark oak cabinet holds at least a hundred movies. I remember vividly,  as a child, racing my siblings down the stairs to see who’d get there first and win the right to pick one.

Now, we sit on the couch, scrolling through Netflix, Hulu, and Disney Plus, while the cabinet gathers dust in our basement, most of its movies sold or given away. We used to own records, copies of games and movies, books, and physical photographs. Now it’s all online, hidden behind a subscription that increases every year.

I’m not sure if the solution here is to bow to our anxieties of impermanence and print everything out and buy everything hardcopy, or if it is to damn it all and live in the moment, to accept what it is to exist for one perfect moment in an unravelling and increasingly chaotic universe.

Maybe that’s the truth of it. Memory isn’t something we own, something we are guaranteed to ever hold onto, nor do we own the atoms in our body. We briefly borrow them.