If you were to look at my life’s timeline, you’d be able to sniff out my inevitable interest in computers starting from when I was a kid. I played games religiously as an escape from a mundane life and there are many games on the computer.

Knowing that, it shouldn’t be surprising to hear (read) that my computer’s seen its fair share of use. I can’t exactly show you “use”, so here’s something else.

These are the drives set up for file storage on my computer. Totaling over 1 TB of data, this is what I would think is one of the best metrics for how much I rely on it.

I’m showing you drives rather than the computer because just like the amount of “use” a computer has, it’s hard to see how important a computer is just from looking at it. I can tell you how important it is, but this image does the same thing, leading to me choosing to show you the image and tell you about it at the same time.

I’ve split up the real number of drives I have installed into multiple logical hard drives for the sake of organization and convenience. It’s easier to clean things up if I can wipe a specific part of my computer’s storage without touching literally everything else in that drive.

This amount of storage might seem like overkill, but sometimes you just need that much space to store things for the future. Games take space, programming takes space, programs take space, everything takes space.

I’m most likely going to clean up both the contents of the drives and the setup of the drives in the future. As much as I like having things in storage, I don’t actually have too much sentimental attachment to the drives themselves or even the things in the drives. I’m attached to the fact that these are the drives I’m using right now, in the moment, with the stuff that I put in there by choice. The drive can change and the contents can change, but the drives themselves being mine is what makes it special. Of course, this means when these drives run their course they’ll be tossed like the rest. Don’t cry though, they knew what they were in for as soon as they were installed.

The thought of being at a computer all day might not sit well (ha ha) with everyone, but it’s my preferred hobby and profession. Why go anywhere else when I can bring anywhere else to me?

I’m sure an argument can be made for my drives lacking sentimentality, especially when I’ve spoken to how I’d throw them out when they were done for. However, I think it’s novel to have a sentimental object that can tell you just how much it’s been important to you.