How many contacts do you have in your phone?
Google tells me I have 805 in total. Yet, in the past week, I have texted a whopping 22 of them for a measly 2.7% engagement rate. With such a large portion of my contacts clearly unused, why don’t I delete some numbers?
For one, contacts take up negligible space on our phones. In the 1990s, when mobile phones were first becoming popular, contacts were stored directly on SIM cards, and early models maxed out at 20 contacts. Storage was at a premium, forcing people to be judicious with whose numbers they saved.
But it has been more than a decade since SIM storage capacity was a relevant factor. The Motorola Razr, a flip phone so iconic it was included in the celebrity gift bags at the 2005 Academy Awards, had 5.6 megabytes of storage space. The average contact file1 is less than 10 kilobytes in size, meaning the Razr could have stored roughly 560 contacts — in addition to the 250 or so contacts that mid-2000s SIM cards could hold.
By the start of the 2010s, the transition from flip phones to smartphones had rendered the contact storage issue truly trivial. Apple debuted iCloud in 2011, and Google Drive followed shortly after in early 2012. Thanks to cloud storage, iPhone and Android users could backup their contact lists and transfer them easily between phones. The “New phone, who dis?” meme has been technologically irrelevant for more than 12 years!
But storage capacity problems aren’t the only reason to delete old files. Everyone’s phones can store 10,000 photos, but we still delete those with our exes after a bad breakup. Digital hygiene habits can be immensely satisfying, even healthy, like spring cleaning for our devices.
And yet, while I purge unused apps from my phone with glee, shunt embarrassing mid-puberty selfies from Google Photos to a hard drive buried in my dresser, and set up a simple script to automatically empty the recycling bin folder on my NAS drive every 30 days, not once have I willingly deleted a contact. A scroll through the 805 name and number combinations enshrined in my Google Pixel 7 revealed gems like “Kyle Economics” (a former classmate?), “Mary Orange Prius” (a former neighbor who moved to Brooklyn half a year ago), and, for some reason, “Poison Control”. It’s good to be prepared, I guess?
Add I’ve Ben Thinking to your contacts 👇🏻
I encountered more than a dozen names — first and last! — in my contacts app that I flat-out did not recognize. Googling revealed the identities behind some of these mysterious inhabitants of my phone, like a guy who I did a problem set with once in sophomore year statistics class or the friend of a summer roommate who always brought alcohol to our pre-games, but some names were either too common or too misspelled for me to determine why they reside in my phone.
I keep these numbers mostly out of laziness, but I coat that laziness with a layer of irrational anxiety, convincing myself every time I go to delete unused contacts that I might need to text Kyle Economics again one day. Kyle, if you’re out there, I’m here for you.
And then there are the sentimental contacts, those I save despite being well-aware that I will never call them again.
In high school, I was friends with a girl named Alex from the grade above me. While working an ice cream serving shift late one early summer night, my phone began vibrating so incessantly that I needed to take my break early. When I stepped away to check my messages, I found out that Alex, who had graduated our high school just weeks earlier, had fallen, hit her head, and died. She was 18 years old.
Nearly 10 years later, I still can’t bring myself to remove her name and number. I realize her carrier has almost certainly reassigned her number, which is to say nothing of how she will never text me back again, but deleting her contact feels wrong. It’s as if erasing her contact would erase the proof I have that our friendship really existed. Since I sort my contacts by first name, I scroll by her entry every few days, and I appreciate the little reminders of the vibrant person she was.
The person behind a contact doesn’t need to have died for my digital hoarding to be sentimental in nature. I doubt I will text Jalil, my study abroad landlord who was older than the nation of Jordan, anytime soon, but seeing his name in my phone envelopes me in warm memories of the washing machine in his apartment that electrocuted me whenever I removed my clothes or the parties my roommates and I hosted while Jalil pretended not to notice.
I’ve long since lost touch with the other ice cream servers who kept me company each summer at my first real job, but the dozen or so 🍦, which I initially sprinkled throughout my contacts to mark those who were willing to swap shifts with me, add flair to an otherwise bland array of letters and numbers. One little emoji has the capacity to make me reminisce on the crazy customers and labor law violations we endured and the bonds we formed working at one of the few places where young people in our small hometown could hangout at night free from the prying eyes of parents and younger siblings.
Ultimately, my strong passion for digital privacy may overpower my nostalgia. I cringe every time TikTok recommends that I follow someone I haven’t seen in seven years just because the app scraped their contacts and found my number in their phone. Back in college, over the course of one week I accidentally venmoed two different people from my high school — sisters, actually — who had the same first names as two of my college friends. This bizarrely coincidental mishap was only possible because Venmo had automatically added everyone in my phone’s contacts to my Venmo friends list.2
These digital intrusions could easily be prevented if we collectively culled our contact lists. Instead, whether out of laziness, emotional attachment, or anxiety, our contact lists grow and grow with no end in sight. Every new job, club, and apartment adds a half-dozen name and number pairs to my phone, and the magic of technology ensures that my digital Rolodex is ported over to each new device I buy.
Eventually, the rate at which I forget who is who in my contacts will outpace the rate at which I save new name and number combinations. I can envision a future, perhaps a decade or so from now, where the names in my phone that I don’t know outnumber those I recognize.
However, unless I am forced to change my ways, these long-forgotten contacts will persist on my phone in anonymous perpetuity, waiting like digital fossils for some particularly invasive social media platform or payment processor to connect a face to a name against my will, rediscovering the identities of the people whose interactions and influences all contributed to shaping the person I am today.
Things I Enjoyed This Week
The Elaborate Story Behind “Shia LeBeouf” Live | MarcButEvil (YouTube)
Quest for coveted EV battery metals yields misery in Guinea | The Washington Post
Inside the Lives of Immigrant Teens Working Dangerous Night Shifts in Suburban Factories | ProPublica
The 1993 Montreal Hockey Riot Raged Against Political Dysfunction and Deindustrialization | Jacobin
Thank you as always for reading. Everyone with my brother Andrew a happy birthday today, and have a great weekend!
Typically a .vcf file. I imagine the size would be even smaller if most contacts didn’t automatically add pictures.
And also because I was a little bit intoxicated both times. They both paid me back, though! I wonder if they still talk about the time I paid each of them by accident in the same week. One of those “keeps you up at night” embarrassing incidents for sure.
I can’t tell you how much I look forward to these!! They always get me thinking too 😁