Only in retrospect. At the time, it's impossible to know. We happen to have (some of) Picasso's childhood artwork. What might it be like if we had da Vinci's and Bosch's and that of the Lascaux Caves artists?
Or look at the way Pepys' diary serves as an important source to historians for the details of daily life at that time. Or how Pompeii's graffiti gives us valuable historical insight: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/adrie...
Destroying information now is expressing 100% confidence that nobody will have use for it later.
> It feels as if the point that I'm trying to make is that mindful archiving is a better solution than to just 'keep all the things' - for me, primarily, it's the far improved wheat / chaff ratio.
Depends on the cost of storage and retrieval, really. That was certainly true for, say, paper letters. But as the cost of storage and retrieval goes steadily down, manual archive selection becomes less and less worth it. Hoarding is only a problem IRL because it becomes expensive and unsafe. But my digital archives grow much more slowly than Moore's Law, so the cost to me of keeping all my email, photos, etc, is effectively zero. When I replace my backup drives every few years I spend about the same amount of money, and I keep having more and more space left over.
