All worldly possessions are prone to attrition and decline. The more you have, the more your life becomes devoted to the vigilant, custodial work of maintenance and repair. This is why so many spiritual traditions advise against becoming attached to material things. 

Ancient philosophers sa...

If it seems odd to think of files and personal data as “possessions,” it’s because they appear to already belong to the spiritual realm.

Information has no visible substance. It’s not composed of matter or energy, at least not in the same sense as a table or a lump of gold. Our files, phot...

Your acknowledgment that your memories are “attached to these bits and bytes” signals an awareness that your identity is mysteriously bound up with those files, that to lose them would be to lose, in a very real sense, an extension of your own mind.

Would you be able to remember that t...

The fragility of those externalized memories dawns on you slowly with age, as portions of your former selves get buried with defunct hardware or fade into the digital void from whence they came, casualties of content drift and link rot. The sudden nostalgic impulse that spurs you to Google your u...

• Forward to friends those old email chains you discovered in your long-abandoned mailbox.
• Consider trying to finish and publish that half-completed novel that’s been lingering in your files—not as some misdirected gesture toward life extension but as a genuine transmission to a good-...