Tape 168: Massive Data Loss

Your Life Is The Project

Until recently, I had a series of lists of pretty much everything I’ve ever done in my life, and I loved my lists. I loved typing them out, and I loved reading them back, and I LOVED thinking about them. I’ve been thinking about them with at least a small part of my brain more or less every waking second for several decades now. I was very young when I began keeping my lists, and if memory serves, my first one was a list of films I owned on VHS, broken down into subcategories for which actors appeared in these films. (I took great pride and pleasure in then organising the list of actors by my personal assessment of the significance and size of their role, which often differed from the order of the official credits, and that made me feel very cheeky and powerful. My list could not be swayed by the demands of powerful agents, it was a true and accurate reflection of the actual content of the film, and that made me feel not unlike a god).

As the years went by, my attention wandered and flitted between various different iterations of these lists, with a different “primary” list taking precedence for a few years before a new one would come along. Most of the lists were Word documents, but sometimes, when I was really chasing a thrill, I would experiment with putting some of them into Excel, where I had the additional dopamine hit of being able to dig into the data and rank the lists using specific columns and explore subcategories within the main data set.

“List Of Every Actor In Every Youth Theatre Production I’ve Been In And The Roles They Played, Ranked By Number Of Lines” was an early magnum opus. “List Of Every Musician Who Has Played On Every Album I’ve Ever Listened To” was an overly ambitious undertaking which I never completed (I had got up to V, so I was so close, but I have not opened that document in ten years, meaning it would now be horrendously out-of-date). “Running List Of Everybody I’ve Ever Met, How Many Times I’ve Met Them, And How Many Times I Mention Them In My Diary”, which I kept up for a few years in my mid-20s, was a nadir, as it was the one that first made me realise these lists sometimes had a negative impact on my feelings.

On that list, I would notice that some people who came out near the top of the “Number Of Times I’ve Met Them” category were people I didn’t necessarily feel that close to, while people I cared about very much were lower down. Sometimes my reaction to this was “I like that person a lot, I should try to see them more,” while other times, to my shame looking back, my reaction was “I seem to not see that person very much any more. Maybe I’ll have to decide to care about them less.” I wish I hadn’t done that. I wish I’d fought to hold onto some friendships that mattered to me harder than I did, instead of letting them slip away. I wish I hadn’t, for a time, let a spreadsheet have any meaningful sway over my friendships in the first place.

After a while, the lists settled down into a manageable core few - a list of every album I’ve ever listened to, a secondary list of the best albums I’ve ever listened to, a list of every book I’ve ever read, a list of every film I’ve ever seen, and more recently, a list of every game of Spirit Island I’ve ever played along with a running tally of the win percentages for each Spirit (this list is rad).

The albums list is my pride and joy, and functions in a very specific way. When I listen to a new album, I listen to it three times in a row. I then listen to approximately four-to-eight other albums which I’ve listened to previously which I deem to be similar to the new album (relying partly on my own intuition and partly on last.fm’s “Similar Artists” function - each of these is also logged and planned in advance using the list). I do this in order to “place the new album in its proper context.” I then listen to it a further two times if I don’t like it very much (Miranda thinks this is the most insane part of the system), or three to four more times if I do like it.

If I really love it, it’ll get nine or ten listens in total. Very, very rarely, I’ll dislike an album enough to only listen to it two or three times, but this is cheating so doesn’t happen often. Either way, the album will then go into the pool of “Albums I’ve Listened To Before” which might be called into service in the future to help me place a new album into its proper context. If I decide the album is “good,” it makes it onto the secondary list, “The Greatest Albums Of All Time.” In order to qualify for the list, I have to score an album at 3 stars or higher. 3.5 stars and above automatically makes the list. If an album scores 3 stars, it is at my own personal discretion whether it counts as one of the Greatest Albums Of All Time (I will not be answering any questions about why a 3-star album counts as one of the Greatest Of All Time. It is my system, so there).

Compilation albums and EPs are included on the main list of Every Album I’ve Ever Listened To and may receive any rating, but are banned from progressing to the Greatest Albums Of All Time list. Live albums are mostly banned from the second list, but are sometimes allowed on in rare circumstances, again chosen at my own discretion.

To be clear - all of this admin makes me incredibly happy. I’ve spent many years batting away accusations that I listen to music in a way that is totally joyless, and that the fact that I know exactly what I’m going to be listening to in six months’ time is borderline psychopathic. But listening to music in this way actually brings me a lot of joy. It makes it into a constant project, and I love a project.

An incredibly evocative depiction of a man overwhelmed by his lists. To be clear, this is NOT how my lists make me feel, but I include it here as I think it’s a wonderful image.

Miranda has often asked me what would happen if I stopped making and updating my lists. My answer has always been “I don’t know, but thinking about that is making me feel awful.” She has therefore occasionally suggested that my compulsive list-making is masking some form of obsessive compulsive disorder. I’ve never quite known whether to accept that or not - I worked in the national specialist children’s OCD clinic at the Maudsley Hospital for a year or so as a secretary, so I have a good working knowledge of the condition and have never really been able to pinpoint the extent to which I suffer from it.

Severe sufferers of OCD carry out their compulsive behaviours in order to stop an intrusive and looping obsessive thought - often the idea that they might harm someone, or do something terrible. I’ve never been conscious of having those intrusive obsessive thoughts, so I’ve never thought of myself as someone who suffers from OCD, even though my behaviour is very compulsive - I’m constantly counting or listing things in my head, I have to knock on things in a specific pattern as I pass them, and so on. Most of this happens unconsciously rather than as a conscious response to a distressing thought, so I never really questioned it much. And yet, when the thought of doing without my lists was put in front of me, an enormous and horrible feeling that I couldn’t name opened up in my chest.

“Ultimately, though, I really enjoy my lists, so I don’t need to worry about that,” I said.

Then at the end of last year, I lost all my data having not backed it up, and all my lists disappeared and it turns out there is, in fact, something significant going on under this behaviour, and maybe I’m not as well-balanced as I thought I was.

I took my laptop into a repair place because it wasn’t charging. They told me it was either the charging port or the logic board, and that they would diagnose it for me. When they worked out what the problem was, they’d call me and ask if I was happy to proceed with the repair. I signed a piece of paper saying I was happy for them to diagnose the problem. Two days later they called me and said it was the logic board and asked if I would like them to replace it. I said that if that was what needed replacing, then they should go ahead. I went back in to collect it and, while turning it back on, asked “And all my data will be there?”

“Oh no, the data’s gone,” they replied. “The logic board is soldered to the hard drive, so if you replace the logic board, you have to delete all the data.”

“Oh,” I said. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“You didn’t tell us you needed us to preserve your data,” he replied. “And we’re not liable for data loss, look.” He pointed to a sign on the wall that said “We are not liable for data loss.” He then showed me the piece of paper I’d signed which, I now saw, had a small clause reading “We are not liable for data loss.”

“Oh,” I said again. “But it could be argued that you didn’t lose my data, you actively deleted it without making it clear to me that that was what you were doing.”

“Do you want me to play back your phone calls and see if you ever explicitly told us that preserving non-backed-up data was a priority?” He asked.

“Well I’d rather you didn’t, because I think I didn’t explicitly say that, and having it played back to me in order to prove me wrong feels a bit like being under surveillance.”

“You are under surveillance,” he replied, “because I know how to protect my business from people like you.”

“Oh,” I said for a third time. “Well I can at least write a bad review of my experience on Google, can’t I?”

“If you do that I’ll sue you for libel, because this conversation is being filmed so I have footage showing that you want to write a review in bad faith with the explicit intention of destroying my business and harming my family. People have done that before and they’ve all regretted it.”

“Right,” I replied. “I guess I won’t do that, then. Do you reckon you could at least tell me that you’re sorry it happened, because I’m finding that I’m having quite an emotional reaction to this, and if you told me you were sorry that it had happened, it might help me to feel better?”

“I’ll tell you what I’m sorry for,” he said, “I’m sorry you’re an adult who can’t take responsibility for your mistakes, and I’m sorry you ever came in here as a customer.”

“Right, ok,” I said. “I assume it’s not possible to get the data back?”

“Yeah, I can get it back, it’ll be £600.”

“Oh no, that’s ok. Thanks so much.”

(Side note - I got texts from them on Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve thanking me for being such a good customer last year and looking forward to seeing me again in 2025, which I think means that the guy I spoke to is a different person from whoever maintains the customer database).

Full disclosure, though - bedside manner aside, this guy was completely in the right. I had failed to back up my data, because it had never even occurred to me that one day my lists might disappear. I had failed to explicitly communicate that I wanted my data to be preserved. I had messed up. It was my fault.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever stayed up until 3am trying desperately to type out by hand a list of everything you’ve ever done in your life, but it’s actually impossible. I’m still trying to rebuild some of the lists - the ones that I actively enjoyed working on day by day. Some of them are gone forever, and that’s fine. I have to make peace with the little creature in my ribcage that flutters and yowls when I think about the fact that they’re gone, but it’s ok.

I’ll tell you what, though - actually sitting in that feeling over the last few weeks and trying to make sense of it has enabled me to give it words and names for the first time in my life.

I’m horrified by the fact that I’ll never listen to every album ever made. I’m horrified by the fact that I’ll never read every book ever written, or watch every film. I don’t think of myself as someone who cares much about death, or time, or ageing - when I think about each of them, I really don’t feel very much at all. I’m quite enjoying getting old, and I’m looking forward to getting older. I don’t care that I’m going to die. But when I think about the albums I won’t listen to and the books I won’t read, I actually start to feel awful. My heart starts beating really fast and my breathing gets weird. So I guess I do care about time. And the lists made me feel like at least I had a handle on what I had listened to, and seen, and read, and done. But underneath all the hours I’ve spent cataloguing that stuff, bizarrely, I think is this thought:

I want to know that I did enough with my time.

I feel kind of sad about that, to be honest. The amount of time I’ve spent trying to convince myself I was using my time well. I’m well aware of how ridiculous it is, that even now, the daily updating of the list is still a little thing that brings me joy, when potentially there’s a completely different way of living that’s more spontaneous and more present and more attuned to my just doing what I want to do. At the moment I have no desire to stop doing the lists, because I do enjoy them, but I’m also aware for the first time in my life what a futile and pointless act it is. And maybe awareness is the first step towards actually undoing the power something has over you. Maybe I’ll stop one day. Or I’ll stop some of them, and keep the ones I don’t want to do without. I don’t know. Like I said, the music list helps me think of the way I interact with music as being one long ongoing project, and I love a project. It means that every day I know I can do one small thing that advances the project, even if it’s just listening to Graceland once. But what if, actually, my life is the project?

Anyway, all of this has been on my mind in the weeks since it happened, and I thought I’d get it all down and see if it meant anything to anyone else out there. I feel a bit funny about having written it, to be honest, it feels a bit more personal than I meant it to. But maybe acknowledging some of it is a good way of helping myself figure it out.

Hope the year is off to a great start for all of you, and that some of you enjoyed this!

A Cool New Thing In Comedy - Alfie Boe joined Adam Riches and John Kearns live onstage for an encore to their show where they pretend to be Michael Ball and Alfie Boe, and it’s my favourite thing that’s ever happened.

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most - Michael Ball’s entrance in this backstage video by Alfie Boe. Yes, I have become obsessed with them.

Book Of The Week - I’ve just finished Happiness By Design by Paul Dolan, because I’m working on a narrative scripted project about happiness so I’m trying to read as much as I can about it. Dolan is an economist, so his approach, contrary to all the books about happiness that are vague and philosophical, is to draw up practical, actionable systems to optimise happiness in your day-to-day life. It’s interesting, but my brain didn’t take to it well. Turns out I prefer the vague, wishy-washy philosophical approach to cold hard stats.

Album Of The Week - Where Is Home/Hae Ke Kae by Abel Selaocoe. My mum got me and Miranda tickets to see this guy for Christmas, so I’ve been familiarising myself with his stuff. He’s an amazing South African cellist who blends traditional South African music with Western classical music, and I can’t wait to see him.

Film Of The Week - A Real Pain. This is great. Kieran Culkin deserves all the awards. It’s a very small, simple road trip movie from Jesse Eisenberg about two Jewish cousins going on a Holocaust tour around Poland and confronting their own personal pain as they do so. It’s also very funny. Very likely to remain one of my favourite films of the year all year, I think.

That’s all for this week! As ever, let me know what you thought, and if you enjoy the newsletter enough to send it to a friend or encourage others to subscribe, that would be hugely appreciated.

Take care of yourselves until next time,

Joz xx

PS If you value the Therapy Tapes and enjoy what they do, and want to support my work and enable me to keep writing and creating, you can make a one-off donation to my Ko-Fi account, and it’s very gratefully appreciated.

PPS I can’t believe I met them: