I Grew up in a Very Tradigital Family

I grew up in a very tradigital family. Every child in the family was assigned chores. I was assigned to wake up early every morning and delete the accumulated photos in our family's Google Drive. It's a task I relished doing.


Somewhere between midnight and dawn, hundreds of blurry screenshots, mysterious ceiling photos, and accidental pocket videos would appear like digital mushrooms after rain. My job was to thin the herd.


I became a connoisseur. I could distinguish, at a glance, between a meaningful image and a photo my dad took while trying to turn up the volume on his phone. I learned to identify my mom's "Why is this sideways?" photos and my brother's endless gallery of half-eaten sandwiches, each one apparently a crucial moment worth documenting.


Once, I accidentally deleted the only clear photo ever taken of our family cat, Pixel, who was notoriously camera-shy and possibly part vampire. The family forgave me, but only after a memorial slideshow composed entirely of stock images of other people's cats.

But the strangest part was that no matter how many thousands of files I deleted, the storage bar never changed. It was always 97 percent full, like some cosmic joke. Google would send warning emails in bold red letters—You are out of storage—as if I hadn't spent my entire childhood battling this very dragon.


To this day, whenever I hear the chime of a new photo notification, I feel a faint tug in my soul. A sense of duty. A whisper from my ancestors: Go forth. Delete.




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