Cox and Thompson describe many reasons for and benefits of personal archiving: supplementing organic memory, augmenting institutional archives, freeing oneself of the “anxiety of committing something to memory,” creating meaningful narratives, defining social relations and communities, achieving political power, and surviving “by leaving something behind” (Thompson 32, Cox 3). Within each example of archiving that Cox and Thompson explore, there’s a curious feedback loop that occurs to the personal archivists from the archives that they create. Not only do the individuals’ life experiences (and any historical events that they may have participated in) become archived as significant “‘atypia’” in their personal collections, but these documentations and recollections often shape the future behavior of the individual curators themselves (Thompson 39). Studying how users of Timehop may change how they engage with current experiences because they’re aware that they will review their check-ins and posts in a future “memorial moment” or how Chinese immigrants could have shaped their community and cultural identities through the documentation of “‘paper families’” caused me to reflect on the ways in which my archiving practices may affect my future behavior and identity (Thompson 38, Cox 14).

With the use of smartphones, many of us are capturing loads of data about our mundane day-to-day activities. In my own life, a couple apps readily came to mind when I considered active documentation I use on my iPhone. Through Mint, which markets itself as an app for “managing your personal finances,” I track my income and expenses. The decision to track the comings and goings of money in my life was active: when faced with a meager graduate student’s wages, I decided to budget (or at least track) my monthly expenses. However, once I made that decision, the app ran on its own: by inputting my account information, the app used data from various online banking platforms to collect and archive all income and expenses that passed through my checking, savings, credit card, and retirement accounts. Mint offers ways to categorize expenses through type and date, and compare them to any goals you set for yourself. Similar to Deb Roy or Gordon Bell’s digital lifelogging practices, once I pressed “go,” I could have simply let Mint record and never take a second look through the data. However, I tend to log in once a day to categorize the new expenses that have popped up and check if the green income bar is higher than the red expense bar for the given month. This is where the feedback loop comes in: Mint has affected my spending decisions. Checking my Mint account influences the price of the drinks and food I buy, when I decide to get my overpriced hair cuts downtown, and when I use my menial stipend as an excuse to get out of travel I really don’t want to take. While using the app, I feel organized and conscientious, maybe even downright frugal. But when I take advantage of the option to pull the data into an Excel spreadsheet to determine how my expenses fluctuated throughout the year, sometimes the data illuminates ways in which I tried to live beyond my means. The app augments my organic memory of where my money went, but also allows for a big-picture view of my behavior. Similar to Roy’s warped memory of his son’s first steps, sometimes Mint robs me of the possibility of a sunny image of my perfect frugality for one of a staid, but imperfect spender. Now, sometimes I make better financial decisions simply to avoid the feeling of disappointment I know I will feel when in the future I look back at the data and could have spent smarter.

Cox and Thompson both bring up the role personal archiving plays in survival. Cox describes archiving as instinctive as “eating, drinking, seeking shelter, and sleeping”—“linked to the human impulse for resisting oblivion” (3). In a concrete example, Thompson brings up how Bell’s obsessive lifelogging has helped him with his healthcare in the wake of a heart attack (31). Similar to Bell, I used archive information to support my medical treatment. After a bout of stomach problems, my doctor asked me to keep a food diary. I used My Fitness Pal, a web-based food diary and activity log with a searchable database of more than one million foods, to track my eating habits and any related symptoms. While the intention was to determine food sensitivities, I gained access to a plethora of information regarding my nutrition. The days I overate or had a burger and fries instead of chicken and spinach, the app collected the nutritional consequences of those decisions. As an unintended consequence of using My Fitness Pal, I began to educate myself about healthy diets to understand the data I was collecting and viewing through the app’s various graphs. Similar to my interaction with Mint, I began to make better health choices simply to avoid the terrible feeling that I had behaved in ways that were detrimental to my own wellbeing. Through some strange form of punishment, the data collected in the app enabled me to eat healthier to avoid the disappointment of seeing how poor meal choices impacted my health. The app gave me accountability through futurism.

While my use of Mint and My Fitness Pal are different from lifelogging since they only capture one aspect of my life, both apps support my survival financially and physically. They foster my ability to spend within my means (well, sometimes) or eat with greater self-awareness, as well as create a narrative of my own contentiousness and self-care. Like Jonathan Edwards’ devotion to recording and archiving his experiences as a means to lend credibility to religious awakenings, by using these apps, I can develop my own proof that I am a frugal, healthy person who will clearly live till one hundred. I’m archiving to ‘resist the oblivion’ of bankruptcy and disease (at least that’s the meaning I create for myself).