Collectively, the Web-privileged world is recording an insane amount of unstructured personal data; so many fleeting thoughts and feelings and desires and needs. Where did this come from? Didn’t we used to manage fine without?
A bit to read: “We, the Web Kids by Piotr Czerski”
If we’re not going to do that, we should probably focus on living in the moment a bit more. I feel like that is healthier, but it goes against my impulse to (at least try to) record and permanently store everything.
We, as living beings, are ephemeral. Some of our data might worth to outlive us, but most of it probably doesn’t. It is indeed important to live and enjoy those moments. Some would say those are the moments dreamers refer to as happiness, so the struggle to archive them could easily invalidate that happiness factor.
If you manage to archive without effort ( see: The best interface is no interface by Golden Krishna1 ) that is probably best of both worlds, and might take the burden off. Thought in my belief, it’s still futile: you can’t re-live everything you forget, since after a while it’d take longer to revive the memories than the time you have left in this world.