I don’t know how many posts I have saved on Instagram. And maybe I don’t want to. Because ignorance is bliss, and the number would absolutely be in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands.
There are workout routines I'll never do, recipes I'll never cook, and thousands of outfits I no longer even like. My TikTok favourites folder tells a similar story. My screenshot album has become an archaeological dig of aspirational selves. Each layer representing a version of me that was definitely going to learn to make choux pastry, get fully into running, or finally become the girl that can do the splits and absolutely has no issues with her hamstrings being as tight as her January budget.
I am digitally hoarding, and I'm willing to bet you are too.
We're basically all running our own version of those hoarder reality shows, except instead of newspapers and broken furniture, we're collecting pins, bookmarks and saves. And like those shows, at some point the collection stops being helpful and starts being its own behemoth of a problem.
You've got 3,000 saved recipes, but when you actually want to cook dinner, you just Google something new. Because scrolling through all those saves feels like mission impossible.
The hoard has defeated its own purpose.
And that’s what I find fascinating, we're hoarding against scarcity in a world of total abundance. We're operating with a Depression-era mentality: "I might need this someday!" But it's information instead of string and buttons.
Except guys, we’re forgetting one crucial piece here: information never runs out. That recipe will still exist on the internet. That article isn't going anywhere. The URL isn't going to evaporate. But we save it anyway, panic-clicking the bookmark icon just in case.
Part of this is, I believe, about the illusion of productivity.
Saving feels like doing something. It feels like learning, like organising, like taking action toward becoming the person we want to be.
In reality, it's just collecting. It's the cognitive equivalent of going into the gym to sign up, you get to feel virtuous without actually doing the work yet. Every save is a tiny promise to Future You. Someone who will definitely have more time, more discipline, more energy to actually engage with all this content. But in this case, Future You never shows up. Future you is too busy saving more things. Like a little crow with a nest of shiny objects that mean nothing to you except for the fact that they’re shiny.
Of course, platform designers know this.
Every app now has a "save for later" feature because it's a perfect engagement metric. It looks like interest without requiring actual interaction. It keeps you coming back (maybe you'll finally look at those saves?). It gives platforms data about your intentions even when your behavior tells a different story. Instagram doesn't care that you'll never make that elaborate charcuterie board, they just care that you thought you might.
There's also something about decision fatigue here. We can't process everything in the moment, so we're just endlessly deferring the cognitive load. "I'll think about this later" becomes a reflex, and suddenly you have 10,000 items in your "think about this later" pile. It's decision procrastination at scale.
But I think the real reason we do this makes me a bit sad. It's that our saved folders are graveyards of good intentions.
They're archives of who we hoped we'd become. The person who cooks elaborate meals. The person who stays informed about everything. The person who does yoga every morning and has a skin care routine and reads literary fiction and understands cryptocurrency and keeps up with multiple hobbies and languages and... it's exhausting just typing that.
And yet we keep saving, keep building these monuments to aspirational selves that will never quite materialize.
Some people have started doing "digital declutters" or "saved post bankruptcy". It's really just deleting everything and starting over because the weight of it becomes too much.
It's the equivalent of those hoarder show moments where they finally just rent a dumpster (or, are forced to.) There's something liberating about admitting that you're not going to do the thing. That saving it doesn't mean you'll engage with it. That letting it go doesn't make you less ambitious or curious or growth-oriented.
Maybe the healthiest thing we could do is treat saves the way we should treat physical possessions: with intention and regular pruning.
Ask yourself when you're about to bookmark something: will I actually come back to this? Or am I just saving it to feel like I'm someone who would come back to this?
Or maybe we just accept that digital hoarding is a symptom of living in an age of infinite content with finite attention.
We're all drowning in information and trying to build lifeboats out of bookmarks. It doesn't really work, but at least we're all doing it together, our saved folders growing quietly in the background. Tiny digital museums to people we thought we'd be.
-Sophie Randell, Writer
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