"I have all this stuff, which I don't want to let go of for control-related reasons," Kristin O'Connell says.
"But I also feel like it controls me a bit. I want to be able to control it better than I can because of the sheer volume of it."
The 37-year-old Sydneysider isn't talking about holding onto physical stuff. She's talking about digital content. And she may be experiencing what's been dubbed by some "digital hoarding".
O'Connell says she has "thousands and thousands and thousands" of screenshots from the last ten years on her phone, as well as hundreds of unread texts from the past year and more than 17,000 unread emails.
O'Connell says she believes this behaviour is linked to her separate diagnoses of PTSD and autism. It means she can't read or delete these texts and emails.
She has also collected and kept around 3,500 files of archived websites and government data for her work, including more than 2,100 PDFs, since May 2021.
"I just can't feel trust that that stuff will be there or easy to find or that I won't need it. I just have all these reasons in my head why I'm justifying doing this when it may not seem logical," she says.
O'Connell is not alone. From unopened emails to the thousands of photos on our phones and archived storage content, the volume of our digital content is what defines life online for many of us.
And while not everyone agrees that data "hoarding" is harmful, and the condition hasn't been included in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), some researchers are concerned about the behaviour.
For example, in 2015 the British Medical Journal published a case study of a 47-year-old man – who'd been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and exhibited traditional hoarding symptoms – who took and kept 1,000 digital photographs each day.
The researchers concluded that digital hoarding should be included as a subtype of hoarding disorder.
In 2022, academics surveyed the experiences of 846 subjects. They reported parallels between the experience of traditional hoarding and digital hoarding.
Darshana Sedera, the director of Southern Cross University's Digital Enterprise Lab, was one of the co-authors of that study.
"[Hoarding comes down to] the propensity of the clutter that you see, how much you collect, and your difficulty of departing from that asset, thereby creating anxiety or stress," he tells ABC RN's Future Tense.
"What we have done in our studies is that we've looked at whether these three characteristics exist in the digital world, and what we see is yes, there are some traits of [hoarding] coming through."
Dr Sedera says that, while more research needs to be completed on digital hoarding, he believes this could be widespread.
"I see it in myself, I see it in my family, I see it in my colleagues. But the extent of that could vary," he adds.
Emotional attachment
Dr Sedera believes we're currently in the perfect environment for the behaviour to thrive.
"Many of these devices, platforms, ecosystems that we have not just encourage us [to keep data], but it almost happens automatically. It's almost like, in order for you to stop collecting the data on [you] or from your devices, you've got to manually stop doing that."
Dr Sedera says another reason we're unable to clean out our online lives is our emotional attachment to our content, such as our posts on social media and the quantity of likes. "We will never delete that, because that someone has liked it," he says.
"And the mechanism for us to take part in that equation has been made much easier by the platform providers and the technology companies."
'Only going to get worse'
Dr Sedera worries about the impact that the hoarding of digital content may have on our mental health.
According to his 2022 study, 37 per cent of the respondents said their digital hoarding caused anxiety.
Dr Sedera says that his study also found there is "a direct relationship between the number of digital devices you own" and a feeling of anxiety.
The survey found that women were 27 per cent more likely than men to experience the negative impacts of digital hoarding, like anxiety.
He's concerned that not enough people are aware of digital hoarding.
"We're dealing with something that's right at our doorstep right now. But we seem to ignore it," he says.
"We talk about the peer pressure coming from social media, the fear of missing out coming from social media – [digital hoarding] would be at the same level, if not bigger."
Given that our lives are likely to continue to be dominated by digital content and social media, Dr Darshana says digital hoarding will likely only get worse.
"So this is going to be very, very difficult for individuals in the future."
Different experiences
Not everyone agrees with Dr Darshana's concerns. Cassie Goodwin, a 42-year-old based in Sydney, believes she's a "digital hoarder".
She has kept about 20 years worth of digital "emotional touchstones", including emails and archived instant messenger conversations within about eight terabytes of data.
She says that by holding onto this content she's able to hold onto mementos of her friendships. These are of particular value because her long history of trauma has left her with mental health issues and memory problems, and these mementos fill the gap.
"Holding on to all this data and all this digital memorabilia really helps fill [my memory gaps]. It gives me a sense of permanence, almost, to things that can slip away very easily," she says.
"Because I am aware of how much my mental health issues mess with my perception of what's true. And what's real – I mean, it's digital, but it's external proof that someone did care about me."
Goodwin believes there are many different experiences of digital hoarding, some positive and some negative.
"I think, just as with physical hoarding, there are limits to what is benign hoarding. I think, perhaps, that if it's impacting your life in a negative way – if you're not getting positive feelings from it, if it's just bringing you down – then that's a different instance to what I experience," she says.
"But I can certainly see how that could happen. I just don't think it's an inherent result of digital hoarding. I think that it can go a couple of different ways."
RN in your inbox
Get more stories that go beyond the news cycle with our weekly newsletter.
