Digital Hoarding: The Endowment Effect of Things We Save and Never Revisit

The save button used to feel like a promise. A little digital pinky swear: "This matters. This is worth coming back to." A harmless-looking square that became our own form of stockpiling. An act of personal curation that spiraled into a full-blown economic phenomenon—scarcity not of things, but of attention.

I believed in the promise when I saved dogs on Instagram, recipes on TikTok, dream homes on Pinterest that, frankly, belong to a version of me from 2019 who still thought white cabinets were aspirational.

Now I want wood grain. I want depth. But the old ones linger.

They pile up, don’t they? Like leaves in a garden we never rake. My thumbs hesitate at the thought of unsaving anything. What if I need it someday? What if I want to show my friend that funny video of a guy dancing to “It’s Friday night”? (Which I’ve saved three times. On three different apps. By three different accounts.) And in my best Maya Rudolph Bronx Beat voice: How many times have I gone back to watch it? Zero. Point. Zero. Zero.

My tabs I can clear. My bookmarks? They terrify me.

Sometimes the saving feels like a kind of memory-keeping. A trigger for something dormant. A video that unspools a childhood street, a smell from a monsoon, a feeling I didn’t know I missed. Other times it’s something else—identity. I once curated my Pinterest boards like they were my autobiography. If a post didn’t match the aesthetic, I wouldn’t save it, even if I liked it.

No one else was watching. But I was.

And that’s the strange thing—we think of saving as a free act. Just a tap. Just in case. But in economics, there’s no such thing as free. Every choice has an opportunity cost. When we hoard content, we trade clarity for clutter, intention for impulse. What was meant to be useful becomes a silent weight.

Think of it like mental inflation. The more we save, the less any single item is worth to us—diluted value. Hyper-hoarding without the hyper-utility. We’ve created digital junk drawers that can’t even hold the emotional weight of what they once meant to us.

When I got into cooking (very, very late, thank you), I felt it was my solemn duty to save every single recipe. How many did I return to? Maya Rudolph voice and all: Zero. Point. Zero. Zero.

And even when a post has served its purpose, I don’t unsave it. It just sits there. A digital ghost of a need already met. Why? Maybe it’s about control. Maybe it’s about the illusion of preparedness.

There’s a kind of loss aversion at play. Letting go of a saved post feels riskier than keeping it—even if we never look at it again. We overvalue the future utility of a thing, just because it's already ours.

This is where the endowment effect sneaks in. The simple act of ownership—of clicking save—changes how we value an item. It becomes harder to part with not because it gained value, but because we gave it value. That little act of saving tricks us into believing it's indispensable.

Because these apps have become more than tools—they’ve become archives. Memory boxes. Diaries we don’t write but compulsively collect. We save things that are important, but we hoard things that felt important, once.

Sometimes I revisit old collections. It’s not always pretty. The quotes I saved during a heartbreak, the Pinterest mood boards I made during an existential crisis. "Those who are truly your friends..." Oh, hush. I know that. But there it is, saved like gospel.

It’s like walking through an emotional attic. Some boxes you open with fondness. Others, you quickly shut.

But here’s a thought: what if there was someone who helped you clean that attic? A digital Marie Kondo, but for your soul clutter. She’d help you unsave, let go. Help you remember that deleting is not erasing—it’s choosing. Like friends who delete couple photos after a breakup—not to forget, but to insist: this is over. This is done. Let’s move.

Maybe that’s what the delete button is: a small exhale. A whisper of closure. A tiny act of reclaiming space.

Maybe it’s time to press it more often.

And maybe, just maybe, the memories worth keeping will find their way back to us anyway.

Disclaimer: I want dibs on the job since I proposed it here.

P.S. Originally written in not so casual tone in 2022.