When it did happen, I lost everything, including all my music, my photos, and my notes for the next day’s midterm. Ever since, I’ve had to use the computers in the Gregory computer lab—a small, smelly room with cinderblock walls. I’m writing this piece there now.

Feel bad for me? So did my friends, whose condolences might have been more appropriate for the death of a relative than for a piece of machinery. But I did feel like someone close to me had died, or more accurately, as if a part of me had. It was so strange that all my files were gone: my memories felt less real. It consoled me that many of my pictures were somewhere on Facebook, as if losing all of them would have been an insurmountable blow. I blamed myself for not owning a Mac Time Capsule: it “backs up a lifetime’s worth of memories.”

A lifetime’s worth of memories… Staring forlornly at the shiny white box, I was reminded of a 2007 New Yorker article about Dr. Gordon Bell, a 73-year-old Microsoft researcher who is trying to digitally archive his entire life. Bell is test-driving a digital database known as MyLifeBits by uploading to it all of his paper documents, sound files of his conversations, videos of his experiences, pictures of everyone he meets, all the emails he sends and websites he visits, and all the steps he takes using a GPS. He even wears a camera around his neck that snaps a picture of whatever is in front of him every thirty seconds. MyLifeBits is supposed to be a “surrogate memory,” a back up in case Bell somehow loses all of his material memories, and a release from having to remember anything himself. It is also the wave of the future: Microsoft speculates that the 200 terabytes needed to back up an entire life, including video recordings of everything that happens, will soon be widely available.

But Bell’s surrogate memory has experienced its own share of crashes, one of which resulted in the loss of several months’ worth of data. In the New Yorker, Bell described this loss as “a severe emotional blow, perhaps like having one’s memories taken away.”

My own loss felt the same at first, as if all of those pictures had been real memories, and without them I couldn’t be sure anything had actually happened. I think this worry is prevalent today. It’s common to be more concerned with documenting an experience than actually having it, like getting in front of a camera before going out, or sightseeing only for the photo opportunities. And there’s always those few tourists who keep a video camera pointed at everything they see. Many will never look at the footage, but they record it because being somewhere and not documenting it seems like not really being there at all.

We need these videos and pictures the same way we need the 20 GB of music on our iPods, and for the same reason that Dr. Bell needs photo documentation of all the commemorative t-shirts he has ever owned.

“There’s just a lot of interesting stuff I want to see,” he told the New Yorker. “And I need it available to me 24/7,” the piece seemed to imply. MyLifeBits is an extreme example of this impulse to hoard memories, but storing pictures, videos, and music on our hard drives seems like their commodification as well. Our technology allows an immaterial and transient experience to transform into an object and to be stored in a database and accessed whenever we want. We think that we need to make our experiences into objects because we know we are capable of it.

This world in which the material backup becomes the memory worries me. Doesn’t psychology tell us that our identities are an intricate combination of genetic potential and life experience? Don’t “my life bits” inform who I am as a person? If I entrust a computer with my memories, am I abdicating my identity to it? According to Bell – sort of.

“[The database] learns to become like you,” he told the New Yorker, “to help you be a better you. Computers are going to become tools we work with and trust, rather than merely appliances.” According to this view, I felt bad when my hard drive crashed because I had lost a better me, a part of myself. But my respect for mankind compels me to deny this. After all, people have made do for centuries with the natural limitations of memory and without the “digital immortality” that MyLifeBits seeks to establish.

They might have even lived more fully, from what Bell’s experience tells us: toward the end of the New Yorker story, he admits that he sometimes feels like he isn’t really living, like maintaining the database is taking over his life. What amazes me is that he continues to think a complete memory archive is a good idea at all.

Bell and MyLifeBits aren’t anomalies; they’re products of a society that distances mortality at every cost. But in denying our transience with concepts like “digital immortality,” we’re distancing ourselves from the present as well. If we rely on recording our memories, we will never be present enough in our lives to experience anything. And when it’s time to hand over our life databases to our children, will they really know us at all?

So I refuse to mourn the loss of my hard drive. My memories aren’t gone. My life bits are all still here, experiences internalized, relationships intact. Besides some useful class notes, I haven’t lost anything.

The only time that memories become capable of physically disappearing is when we treat them like objects that can be cut, copied, and pasted.