So I needed to create an account for some Google service and reused an old email. The email you make when you have no clue what it means, it’s your first after all, probably provisioned by a parent or teacher, and it has your full name and birthday since paranoia is for the sickly.
If I bothered to open this email, I could probably see some middle school assignments submitted, some self-sent PowerPoints because it was the way to store PowerPoints – just log in again, no USB needed. Clicking on the Google Drive comes a swath of B.S. essaying you had to do, making sure you get ten pages, making sure you’re passing classes which, in the most brutal retrospect, lock as a snowglobe does: knowledge as figurines you could move around a bit but is as hermetic as anything save for a digressive point.
When we moved around I ended up tossing all of my childhood papers. This must’ve been a decade ago – and I mean, there’s no justification in holding them. It’s hard to believe anyone would want to see a random child’s chicken scratchings. Those that do often end up in tears wishing they could see the child once more. Others may be incentivized to forget there ever was a child.
So, although it was lucky to have this email, when does one toss it too? Of course, after I’m done with using this spare service, but even then. Google Chats got deprecated at least, so you can’t see anymore of those class chats in the strange chance you ever had to. Maybe they’ll shut down gmail and we don’t have to go through the laborious swatting around switching out account settings and questioning if you should delete all the email-linked services instead.
There was an attempt, maybe 5 years ago, to make a serious statement about “de-googling”.
I signed up for some other provider which allows you to link your own domain, e.g. admin@neocities.org.
But it’s just too convenient to leave these Gmails around on the off-chance it’s needed. Some bureaucratic thing, most likely.
I was able to delete a few of them, actually. Just not all.
So then you wonder, well, what will it take? Are you just going to leave a trail of bits, later to haunt?
It’s clear one is most motivated by how unpleasant it is to hold onto such things. These Gmails, despite their history, don’t necessarily bother. By the same token, all those childhood papers unsettled enough to do something about it. It’s strange how some strings of the past don’t register – like the gmails – but other strings of the past choke you – like the papers.
Maybe it was how much it meant, or how little, or how disturbing since it shakes something beneath around. Confronting that, well, whatever is here isn’t actually worth anything. Even if it took years of your life.
Some may argue that the Internet is the Infinite Jest, or loving novelty machine, but there’s something persistent in the human spirit to render a nausea out of everything. Like the reality of looking at YouTube’s front-page for ten years or more. Whatever is plattered doesn’t matter because the nausea wave comes. And now you can’t use YouTube anymore. Now you can’t watch movies anymore, talk to those friends. Download anime, books – fiction as a sickness I guess.
I guess – after booting up that old Gmail – I guess I’m just wondering what’s the next nostalgic-nausea wave to come.