Delete by default

A challenge for YOU + some personal updates + new challenge in October!

Hi everyone!

You may have noticed emails have been a bit irregular lately.

Here are some of the things I’ve been up to:

• Learning German — I’ve lived in Berlin for 8 years and figured it was time to push myself to “fluent with lots of mistakes”, so for the past months I’ve been taking daily classes as I prepare for next month’s exam. 📚

• Laying the foundations for going freelance — once I’m done with the German course, I’ll finally have more time to take on clients again for my freelance strategy work, innovation management workshops, public speaking, moderation, and writing. 💼

• I also dropped by the MUSIC FRONTIERS conference in Berlin last week — my first music tech conference in ages. It was great catching up with familiar faces, and it was lovely to hear that the Calm & Fluffy chapter of my writing strikes a chord with so many of you. 💕

Now, what’s coming up:

• In March, I left my smartphone at home for a month. Then, in June, I set myself the task of building an app and ended up making four. October will see me embark on a new, daunting challenge. I will share the details soon, but as a small hint: imagine the inverse of the March challenge. 🛜

• I will also kick off an interview series soon with creators and literal movers and shakers, to help you become more calm & fluffy. ☁️

Today:

I have a little challenge for you.

Delete by default

When I met someone last year and we exchanged our first WhatsApp messages, the chat was set to automatically delete after 90 days. I wasn’t aware of this feature; moreover, I hadn’t seen a feature like this used in a messaging app outside of maybe sharing something spicy (🔞) or for sharing sensitive information. In this case, it was set as a default for our whole chat. It was food for thought.

Eventually, I decided I liked it. With certain close friends, I probably communicate more through WhatsApp and similar apps than I do in person. While I value the luxury to record all of this, I think there is more merit to relying on each other’s memory instead, and us intentionally archiving the moments we cherish.

My shared experience with my friend is between us. It doesn’t belong in the archives of a tech company. Google doesn’t need to train its AI on the email exchanges I had with a partner back in 2005. A private moment between friends shouldn’t be accessible to whomever happens to get their hands on my unlocked device. And we’re not talking about just one private moment — rather, all private conversations.

So after a few months, I made the switch and flicked the setting on in WhatsApp. Now, whenever someone starts a new conversation with me, everything is automatically deleted after 90 days. And it feels damn human.

You can always choose to archive. When you share photos or memes you’d like to keep, you can save them to your device. When something funny happens in the chat that you’d like to remember, you can screenshot it. Or perhaps even better: you can journal it.

You also don’t have to apply it to every chat. Some I would care to record more than others. But overall, I prefer the weight of choosing what to keep, over the weight of knowing that everything is recorded and accessible to who knows.

It started as an experiment, and it has made me think: what is the mental cost, the privacy cost, and the cost in freedom, if everything is recorded, even those things I won’t bother to remember or I didn’t find important enough to record? What value will I put in those records? Is the value I might experience from one record worth recording everything?

I haven’t quite made up my mind. And I’m not trying to convince you of anything. However, I found a surprising peace in records being deleted by default. It’s a practice I already had in place for privacy reasons. For example, every few years, I’ll delete my Reddit accounts and start new ones.

So I invite you to join me on this challenge.

Experiment with deleting by default, rather than recording by default.

This can be by using the WhatsApp feature, but it can also mean that you save your data from an old account, delete it, and then create a new one.

Just have fun with it. Be inventive. Be curious.

See if it brings you peace.