There’s really no other way to say this: I love saving trash. Receipts from favorite shops or meals, flyers and maps from excursions, ticket slips, clothing tags—if it’s some junk from a fond memory or even a well designed one, I put it away in random corners of my house and often forget about it until I go in search of something else.
The impulse to pile up documents is likely to be annoying to anyone who lives with me. Unfortunately for them, it’s also very good for my business. At least one Wayback Machine tab stays open at all times, and I have a horrifying number of screenshots, recordings, texts, and notes clogging every device I own. But unlike physical events packed away in drawers and boxes, the files on my computer are just that: shapeless, searchable, not scattered on dresser tops or forgotten in pockets and piles. My supply of nuggets and bobs hasn’t become an issue yet, but I’m finally starting to think about what I might actually do do with them – When we’re talking about pulling receipts on something, I don’t think it was meant to be literal.
I have plenty of digital outlets at my disposal to archive what I do with my time, but none of them seem like a good fit for my precious junk heap. I thought of Instagram Stories — edgy and casual enough that a cute arrangement of paper cut-outs and cute shopping bags didn’t seem out of place. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to share my interests with others in order to get rid of them. And once I’ve taken a picture, what do I do with the physical evidence? You are back to square one.
In the end, my solution was as low-tech as you can get. Instead of coming up with a clever new way to preserve these little trinkets, I grabbed a glue stick, scissors, and a blank notebook and went to town.
Scrapbooking is an activity that people have been doing for centuries, and once you get going, it’s obvious why it has been around for so long. One of my favorite Instagram accounts, paperofthepast, collects and documents vintage and vintage scrapbooks from the 19th century. Scrolling through the images is as surreal and transportive as it is beautiful, but I try not to exaggerate too much about what the original owner wrote for fear of feeling like an outsider. Before I came across my Instagram account, I didn’t really consider that these everyday documents could survive at all.
Generations ago, someone kept cigarettes, food packaging labels, and friends’ fingerprints in bound books. Now 100 years later, the contents have been immortalized on social media. It’s a little weird to be able to look into a stranger’s private musings, but seeing what people think they’re going to save is amazing, and the layouts and aesthetics look incredibly contemporary and modern.
Scrapbooking has also been completely foolproof, even when the material inside doesn’t represent actual life. For fake scrapbooking videos, it’s the bundling process that draws people in. TikTok accounts like @senajournal create ASMR-level videos by peeling off stickers, tearing paper, and arranging the pieces on a page — but the scraps in question are often coming from a sheet of patterned paper or images that look like they’ve been ripped from mood boards (some collages include torn bits of paper). pseudo-cursive characters). The pages look perfect, and there’s just something weird about the whole exercise. Imagine someone found a scrapbook in 100 years and a message stuck on it started, “Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sitting Amet…”
There are very few things in modern life that companies haven’t tried to digitize, whether it makes sense or not. From software for making grocery shopping lists to apps that track and share a user’s running route, there’s a technology “fix” that’s constantly popping up. It happened in bundling, too: Last year, Pinterest’s invite-only app, Shuffles, caused a brief frenzy among young adults desperate to use it.
Maybe I’m old, but so far, nothing beats the physical experience of putting together and revisiting a book of my favorite things that I can hold in my hands. Each piece placed in its place feels like another preserved memory; It’s hard to imagine getting that satisfaction from clicking “Share”. And when the time comes to move on—from a chapter in life or from that plane of existence altogether—I can do whatever I like with my junk. I hope my random odds and ends won’t be on a stranger’s Instagram account in the future and certainly won’t be kept in digital form on some company’s data servers. The best clippings are at their truest form – irregular, imperfect, and disposable if necessary.