The Rubbish Bin Knows Me Better Than I’d Like to Admit

There’s something quietly unhinged about the bin section on your phone, or any piece of tech you own. It’s supposed to be boring, purely functional, just a digital landfill where unwanted files go to disappear. But if you look at it for more than five seconds, it stops feeling empty and more personal. Embarrassingly personal. Because the stuff you send there isn’t actually garbage. It’s pieces of your life, badly lit and badly timed and sometimes duplicated six times in a row.

Right now, the bin on my laptop is a weird museum of who I’ve been lately. There’s party which is a picture of blurry lights, half-faces, someone laughing too hard at something that definitely wasn’t that funny. There’s Basil, my cat, mid-blink, stretching out after a nap. There’s Winter Wonderland (Cardiff), with the marshmallows that costed £5 but I believe worth it. There’s Cardiff – photo 10, which is named that due to the amount of pictures I took in the same spot. And then there’s The Newt (Duplicate) and Flowers (duplicate), which sound less like photos and more like rejected book titles.

Actually realising what was in my bin today made me consider that the bin isn’t just storage. It’s judgement.

It’s where your tech decides what matters and what doesn’t. It silently labels your experiences as “unnecessary”, “extra”, “already seen”, “safe to delete”. It teaches you, in the smallest ways, that too much is bad. That keeping things twice is indulgent. That holding on is inefficient.

Because life duplicates itself constantly. Days repeat. Feelings recycle. People say the same things in different ways. You fall in love with the same type of person in a different outfit. You take the same photo of your cat because he looks just as stupid and perfect as he did yesterday. But your tech doesn’t see that kind of poetry. It sees “duplicate file” and reaches for the broom.

Calling it “garbage” is the worst part. That word’s doing way too much. Garbage is supposed to be empty pizza boxes and broken batteries and stuff that doesn’t matter anymore. Not Cardiff in December. Not your favourite street from the wrong angle. Not Basil looking slightly possessed by the stretching position. But the bin flattens it all into the same category: disposable.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth, we start believing it.

You start deleting photos not because you don’t care, but because your phone tells you you shouldn’t. You convince yourself you don’t need ten versions of the same memory. You pretend you won’t miss it. You train yourself to let go faster than you’re ready to. And your storage gets lighter, but something else gets heavier, quiet and unnamed.

So if you’re like me, and your bin is full of parties, cats, cities, and repeats that refuse to behave, maybe don’t rush to empty it. Maybe sit with it. Scroll slower. Let yourself remember why you took the photo in the first place.

Not everything that’s old is useless. Not everything that’s duplicated is wrong. And not everything in the bin is garbage.

I would also like to state that I have tried everything to get rid of the buttons bellow, as I have not set up those specific apps yet, but unfortunately nothing has worked. Please ignore, thank you!