收藏夹, 数字时代的幻觉与自我安慰
我常常在社交媒体上收藏各种内容，它们曾像是我在信息海洋中用心打捞出的宝物，每一条都让我觉得有意义。我以为之所以要收藏，是因为在当初真的觉得它们重要，这些收藏代表了我的兴趣、好奇与思考。因此收藏它们，是想着自己有朝一日要真地去看，或推荐给朋友。
就在前几天当我心血来潮去翻看这些收藏时，却发现并非如此，那些我以为值得记住的收藏，如今看上去既陌生又杂乱。那种感觉，就像翻开一篇自己在半梦半醒中写下的模糊支离的旧日记，甚至让我困惑为何当初会选择收藏这些内容。
我的收藏里装满了各种各样的内容：比如巴黎街头咖啡馆的短片，教人用围巾搭出不同造型的视频，五花八门的食谱，一位睡眠专家对睡眠的分析，TED Talk 上的灵感演讲，Alex Cooper 的播客等等。它们看似杂乱无章，却像是我精神世界的碎片，在不经意间拼凑出我对世界的想象与理解。
收藏，其实是一种幻想。它让我们相信自己不是被动的内容消费者，而是主动的探索者。我们会告诉自己，这些收藏会在未来的某一天派上用场，那时我会变得更聪明、更有灵感、更有行动力。
但事实上，那些被我收藏的内容，几乎从未被我重新打开过。收藏这个动作，本身更像是一种心理安慰，在害怕遗忘的同时，用保存来假装自己还记得。
在这个内容爆炸的年代，社交媒体以它精明的算法与推送源源不断地用新鲜感维系着我们的注意力，让我们觉得自己看到了更多的世界。但与此同时，你是否觉得当我们可以刷上千条内容时，却很少体验到真正的发现。
这些算法打着以效率为名，却在不知不觉间让我们的世界变得越来越狭窄。它把探索的过程变成了单纯的消费，把好奇心磨成了机械的滑动。而“收藏”这个小小的符号，也成了这种幻觉的一部分，它让我们以为自己在学习、在收集，然而真正留下的，其实是一堆没有时间去消化的碎片。
我想起播客主持人 Merlin Mann 说过一句话：“储存，是你生命中最没有力量的空间。活跃的地方代表未来的可能，而储存，只是情感上代价高昂的过去。” 收藏夹，就是那样的地方。它占据了我们的注意力，却几乎从未真正让我们前进。我们以为收藏是留住思考，其实它让我们停止了思考。
作家 Joan Westenberg 曾在一篇文章中写到，她删除了自己十年来积累的上万条笔记和收藏。她说那一刻感到的不是损失，而是解脱。“在设计里，删减意味着精炼。雕塑家敲掉一切不属于形体的石头，音乐家删去多余的旋律。而在知识工作中，我们却把积累当作美德。也许，删除才是真正的自律。”
收藏夹是数字时代的幻象，它让我们以为，未来的灵感和智慧都储存在那些标记的小方块里。但真相是，所有未被打开的收藏，最终都在慢慢腐烂。而真正属于我们的生活，从来不在以后，只在当下此刻。
也许，我们真正需要的，不是更多的收藏，而是更少的依赖。当我们停止囤积，重新走入当下，去读一本书，听一个播客，与人交谈，或只是认真看一段视频，那一刻，我们才重新拥有了思考的能力。
The Illusion of the Bookmark Folders
I often save content on social media - posts, videos, articles. They once felt like treasures I had carefully picked out from the endless stream of content, each one meaningful in its own way. I believed I saved them because they mattered, because they represented my interests, curiosity, and thoughts. I told myself I would one day return to them, read them carefully, or may share them with friends.
But a few days ago, I decided to revisit my bookmarked folders, and realized that wasn’t true at all. Those things I once thought were worth remembering now looked unfamiliar or dated. It felt like reading an old diary I’d written in a half-dreaming state, fragmented and incoherent, and I couldn’t even understand why I had saved them in the first place.
My collection is full of all sorts of things: short clips of Parisian cafés, videos teaching creative ways to wear a scarf, endless recipes, a sleep expert analyzing the science of rest, inspiring TED Talks, and long episodes of Alex Cooper’s podcast. They might seem random, they trace the outlines of my inner world, quietly reflecting how I once imagined and understood the world.
Saving content, I’ve come to realize, is a kind of fantasy. It lets us believe we’re not passive consumers of content but active explorers and collectors. We tell ourselves these saved posts will be useful someday, that we’ll return to them when we’re wiser, more inspired, more ready to act.
But in truth, I rarely open them again. The act of saving becomes less about remembering than about comforting myself.
In this era of information overload, social media’s clever algorithms and endless feeds keep us hooked on novelty, making us feel as though we’re seeing more of the world. Yet, have you noticed how, despite scrolling through thousands of posts, we seldom experience true discovery?
These algorithms, all in the name of “efficiency,” quietly narrow our world. They turn exploration into consumption and curiosity into mechanical scrolling. And the humble “save” icon has become part of that illusion - it convinces us that we are learning and collecting, when in reality, we’re simply gathering pieces we’ll rarely truly return to.
Podcaster Merlin Mann once said, “Storage is the least muscular or affirmative use of space in your life. Live and active areas represent future possibility; ‘storage’ is an emotionally costly way of warehousing the past.”
That is exactly what our bookmark folders are—spaces that consume our attention but rarely move us forward. We think saving preserves our thoughts, but more often, it stops us from thinking.
Writer Joan Westenberg once described deleting over ten years’ worth of notes and bookmarks. What she felt wasn’t loss, but relief. “In design, folks talk about subtraction as refinement,” she writes. “A sculptor chips away everything that is not the figure. A musician cuts a line that clutters the melody. But in knowledge work, we hoard. We treat accumulation as a virtue. But what if deletion is the truer discipline?”
So the bookmark folders may indeed be a modern illusion. It makes us believe that future inspiration and wisdom lie safely stored in those tiny squares. But the truth is, all the links we never revisit slowly decay. What truly belongs to us has never been in “someday”, it’s only ever here, in this moment.
Perhaps what we need is not more saving, but less dependence. When we stop collecting endlessly and return to the present, to read a book, listen to a podcast, talk to someone, or simply watch one video with our full attention, that’s when we truly begin to engage with the world again.