This is the age of information anxiety. This is the age of overconsumption. This is the age of diminishing attention spans, doomscrolling, and a multitude of statistics being thrown at you that all summarise the same thing: the human brain was never meant to process this amount of information at this speed, and as a result, we’re struggling to keep up.

Do you consider yourself to be a hoarder? In today’s age, that reference is not someone who keeps too many receipts, latches on to an expired tin of lip moisturiser or keeps two notebooks worth of scribblings and penned- down thoughts (if anything, the latter is now recommended behaviour). Instead, that term is for somebody who has 15,000 photos in their mobile phone gallery, a fifth of them being screenshots, and the bookmarks tab on Instagram and TikTok amounting to hundreds. These include videos, camera filters, audio files and products, collated at a speed faster than a person a century ago would need to fill the shelves of the local community library. The term has coined as Digital Hoarding.

At present, information is taken for granted as social media moves at lightning speed. We are living in a timeless time where anachronism is the norm and is being practiced as such. Things are both old fashioned and new fashioned simultaneously. Things exist without the context of temporality. Aging can be de-aged and patina can be applied without the consequence of time. In this collapse of time, we are both contextless and hyper-contextual — fed by algorithms designed to supplement both our scarcity and our excess of meaning. The overwhelming amount of information, whether useless or relevant to us, that we receive everyday is more than what we can output, and that in turn, is making us backlog a lot of things that we want to interact with, after the already menial task of sifting through your For You Page to see what you really want to pay attention to. 

FOMO, FOMO, FOMO.

You are familiar with that feeling. Imagine you are doomscrolling at night, and seeing something interesting: a snippet of a podcast or article, or a list of recommendations on what to eat, read, or listen to. But instead, you save it for later, thinking it is productive — having perceived it for a mere 2 seconds already feels like you did something. It then collects cyber dust, never to be revisited. Now, you have amassed a pseudo-toolkit for self-enlightenment: “This piece of content will save me, but I’ll engage with it after a few more scrolls.” However, those tools never manifested for your use.

This is a psychological challenge, one that is shaped by our collective conditions. Its root causes are familiar: anxiety and the fear of missing out (FOMO). This fear, mixed with information overload, leads you to a choice paralysis. Everyone experiences digital FOMO because the fear of being left behind extends to our fear of not knowing enough. Hence, we overconsume.

Aspiration Quietly Drives This Obsession

Imagine this: it is Men’s Paris Fashion Week in June, the season where culture is shaped in real time. Runway collections are being put out, celebrities are rushed towards photocall booths or their front row seats, and just about anything or everything can go viral on the internet, given the right circumstances. Memes are saved. Photos are downloaded, kept or screenshotted to the gallery.

I was engaging in some sort of identity signalling while saving and bookmarking related content as I was scrolling through TikTok, Instagram, and X. Saving these images and screenshots is rarely a neutral act. It is subconsciously strategic — we are telling ourselves not just what we like, but what we want others to know what we like. Because yes: maybe that tidbit of information on Jonathan Anderson’s debut for Dior does point me in the direction of my tribe and the people I hope to talk to. Taste becomes a form of social positioning — drawing invisible lines between those who get it and those who do not. In the background is aspiration: a quiet, persistent drive to know more, belong, and climb higher.

But How Do I Stop It?

Curbing digital hoarding is less about deleting your screenshots folder every time it fills up, and more about changing the way you interact with content. Be ok with missing out. Having creative edge does not come from knowing everything, but from paying deeper attention to a few things. According to an Oxford study from 1999, creativity is strengthened by periods of focused attention followed by reflection, not endless input. Incubation is key; missing out on a few hours of scrolling to focus on what you really want to engage can arguably produce more creative value than your average doomscroll. With the issue of your existing clutter, simply go through what you want to delete and ask yourself: “Will this serve me, my work, and my insight in the future?” Does the meme that I screenshotted two weeks ago still hold the same relevance as it did then? Likely not. If algorithms can serve you at high speed, you can retaliate by deleting them just as quickly.

Once you are done with this story, click here to catch up with our September 2025 issue.