Why I Have an iCloud+ Subscription

When you buy an iPhone, it comes with 5 GB of iCloud storage. 5 GB — 5000 MB, 5 million bytes. Enough to max out at around 1000 photos, plus some text messages, documents, and system updates. But soon you find that the standard 5 GB is not enough for your photographic habits. Every Sunday afternoon, the first notification that pops up along with your weekly average screen time report is the “your storage is full!” warning. 

“You could lose your data forever!”

This baseline restriction is largely reminiscent of the internet controversy when Snapchat announced it would limit “memories” to 5 GB unless you paid for a subscription. The thousands of memories people saved from when they were 11 in 2012 could all vanish. People scrambled to find ways to download their data — they looked at how to funnel their memories into an alternative repository, desperate to find ways of salvaging the past pieces of their lives before the corporation deleted them entirely.

But perhaps it’s not the issue of 5 GB. It might be okay as long as you keep them within the limits of 200 GB. Or 2TB. That was my thought, too. For $2.99 a month, I looked at the iCloud+ subscription plans and thought about how much more convenient it would be to pay off my data anxiety. Two dollars and 99 cents a month wasn’t just about storing my past — it meant extending my future. Yet as I write this introduction, I am hitting 174/200 GB of my allotted storage. I am running out of space to document my memories. I am running out of a body to store my life. 

It’s interesting how corporations have chosen to use the word “memories” to represent data about your life. A saved image of an internet meme or bookmarked websites might not belong to you IP wise, but when grouped together with every picture you have taken, your iMessage history, your notes app files, they become united by the fact that you found importance in or connections to them. Your internet memories host your second life, contained within the body of your device. Sure, it’s not a conclusive representation of yourself, but it represents a timeless space that will be there regardless of whether you return to it. Whether you die or forget about it. It is a safety net for our existence, copied down in a digitally contained but physically present medium. So when we run out of storage, it may seem like we are running out of safety, running out of life. 

But I want to step back a bit. I don’t want to focus on the phone, the internet, or the deceptions of subscription models. I am trying to point out that our generation may actually have a hoarding problem with our data. For example, take my 16,000-photo album collection. I think the psychology behind my own obsession with taking photos is my attempt at defining my life through experiences lived. I’m sure many people in this digital generation will relate — we “capture” to the extent of “digital hoarding,” an excessive storage of photos and other digital information that causes us disorganization or stress.

It’s easy to recognize physical hoarding, but it’s harder to see when everything is digitally packed behind gigabytes and subscription plans. When I felt myself getting more annoyed and concerned about those iCloud notifications, I started asking myself, why do I keep the things that I keep? At some point, not all of my 16,000 photos have some kind of importance. 

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with looking at pictures and reminiscing. I love the moment of reflection, of nostalgia, longing, and happiness I enter when I go through my own photos. But when this momentary happiness turns into anticipatory preservation, something about its nature changes. 

I think it’s incredibly powerful that we have this technological tool in the form of iCloud storage — it serves as a physical reminder that we have the ability to choose what to remember and what to forget. But with this external reminder and dependency, we can also get paranoid and second-guess what we haven’t chosen to remember. We overcompensate for our forgetful nature. What if this doesn’t happen again? Maybe it’s the pretty irises outside of Frost that only bloom through spring and early summer. Maybe it’s the particular way the sun sets over Memorial Hill that leaves it slightly redder or purpler than usual. 

All of these things are presupposed by the fact that we would like to think that every existence is unique, including our own. So when I capture the sun, the quad, my friends, myself, I am trying to capture that uniqueness, knowing that I won’t see it exactly the same after that point. I know that the sun may set every day, but all sunsets are different depending on how it sets over the hill, what air particles are present, the temperature, the cloud cover. But in preserving, are we not also attempting to duplicate that existence, which is beautiful through its uniqueness? We are trying to make permanent what cannot be relived again. 

But what’s the line between capturing to merely commemorate the time, versus devoting all your energy to a second life? When your instinct is to take a picture instead of remembering? What’s the threshold between living to live, and living to preserve? We worry about how to make our lives more definite, as if it wasn’t definite enough in the first place for us to have breathed, walked, and lived on this earth. As if feeling our bodies underneath our skin isn’t enough, and we need screens and audio outside our bodies to prove we’ve lived. This overdefinition is just one of our attempts to fill in the underdefined feeling we have towards life. And so I extend these questions beyond phone storage — What are you saving for later? What are you storing away now that you’ll be afraid of lacking in the future? 

Will I keep paying $2.99 a month for 200GB? Probably. But I have reconsidered falling into the comfort of an “unlimited” outlook on storage, to really see the boundaries that shape our lives. I still treat photography as a way to document and journal my life, but I am much more intentional about the things I capture. 

I’ll end with one more example. I have a friend who does not use Google Calendar or a planner at all. I was shocked at first — how does she keep track of things? But somehow, it all works out for her. She turns her things in on time and remembers our weekly lunch routines. She has developed an acute intuition for events and to-dos without a dependency on a calendar. For me, the more I use the calendar, the more I have to check it every hour of my life to keep track of my day. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to use my Google Calendar and pay for my iCloud subscription, but it’s interesting to notice things like this — to be aware of what our blind dependencies might be. Ultimately, it all comes down to recognizing habits that we might have and being more intentional in our everyday choices.