At first glance, 21-year-old Lu Zhi's digital life looks excessive. The internet industry worker based in Qingdao, Shandong province, owns 11 smartphones of different models and one tablet, far more than most people of her age.

Lu began using multiple devices in 2023, starting with an iPhone XR purchased as a backup phone for photography. Carrying it on daily outings encouraged her to document moments she might otherwise overlook — street scenes, fleeting light, everyday pleasures.

"I started taking photos whenever I saw something beautiful or interesting, which made me feel more connected to life," said Lu.

What followed was not a calculated expansion, but a gradual accumulation. Older models, some with limited performance, were added one by one. Lu affectionately refers to them as "electronic little junk", devices that may be outdated by advancing tech standards but still hold personal value.

"I like collecting them. When I have time, I play around with them. They give me a sense of pure happiness," she said.

Each device in Lu's daily routine has a role. Her main phone, an iPhone 16 Pro, handles work communication, social media and online shopping. The XR and iPhone 8 Plus are reserved almost exclusively for photography, prized for their distinct camera styles. The iPad is used for watching videos and streaming shows.

Despite the pleasure it brings her, Lu's digital excess is not without tense moments. She admits to feeling anxious when storage space runs low on a device.

"Its memory is small, but the photos keep piling up. When it kept reminding me that storage was full, I had to rush to move photos elsewhere and decide which ones to delete. That is stressful," she said.

Yet, she has little desire to cull her digital memories. "They show who I really was at that moment. When I look back, I can remember exactly how I felt, which is a comfort for me," she said.

Can't press delete

In a world where memory is measured in gigabytes, many young Chinese are accumulating large amounts of digital possessions — photos, videos, saved posts and even devices — not necessarily out of anxiety, but as part of everyday work and life.

A 2024 survey by the Social Survey Center of the China Youth Daily found that 82 percent of respondents engage in digital hoarding, with photos, chat records and audiovisual content being the most commonly saved. Over half described the behavior as psychologically comforting, while 54.6 percent said digital content should be saved more selectively.

Zou Yifan works in content planning and marketing in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, and, on an average day, adds three or four new items to her digital collections, sometimes more.

They might be places she wants to visit, books she plans to read, films she hopes to watch, or restaurants she has seen recommended online. Occasionally, it is nothing more than a few well-phrased sentences or a line that happens to resonate with her.

Her phone and cloud storage are filled with photos, screenshots, and short videos that are randomly stored. When she visits popular destinations she takes a large number of photos, many of which she keeps without extensive editing. Her favorite TV shows and films are saved to cloud drives, making it easy to revisit them at any time.

"I like knowing they're there, so I can look back whenever I want to relive the moments, or just have them ready for inspiration. It's not about keeping everything perfect, but about having a library I can return to whenever I need it," said Zou.

Although she may not remember every item she has saved, she trusts her intuition. "At the moment I save something, I'm sure it will be useful one day, even if I can't see exactly how right now," she said.

Sometimes, months later, an old screenshot sparks a campaign idea, a saved restaurant inspires a spontaneous dinner booking, or a forgotten film offers unexpected inspiration.

She describes her digital life as "messy, but with its own order". "The logic may not be obvious to others, but it works for me, so I don't feel overwhelmed by all the things I've stored, and I don't feel pressure to constantly clean it up," said Zou.

Based in Shanghai, 41-year-old photographer Lin Xi has spent more than a decade accumulating photographs, video footage and creative notes. His professional work is carefully organized — files are sorted by client and date, edited collaboratively, and systematically archived.

But beyond commissioned projects, a different archive has been growing. Personal shoots, visual experiments and half-formed ideas are stored quickly and rarely revisited, scattered across devices and folders without a clear organized system.

Since the pandemic, Lin's time has been increasingly divided. As commercial photography slowed, he opened a small neighborhood bakery, taking on a second role alongside his studio work.

"Since then, my days have been divided between photo shoots, post-production meetings, bread preparation and customer service. There's never enough time," said Lin.

That constant switching has shaped how he handles his materials. While work demands structure, his personal content is left largely unorganized, accumulating as "ideas in progress". For Lin, keeping things unfinished has become part of how he works.

"I know I'm hoarding," he said."But for me, it's not anxiety-driven. It's more like leaving things unfinished, waiting for the right moment to come back to them."

This unfinished archive is not simply clutter, but part of his creative process. "Those materials are alive. If I organize everything too early, I feel like I might kill the possibility," he said.

Order in chaos

According to market consultancy IDC, global data generation is expected to more than double from 213.56 zettabytes in 2025 to 527.47 zettabytes by 2029. In China alone, annual data output already exceeds 40 zettabytes, highlighting a widening gap between data creation and meaningful use.

For 26-year-old Lu Lu from Changsha, Hunan province, order in the digital world is not a personal choice but a professional necessity that reshapes how she works and thinks.

"Every designer needs a personal material library," she explained. "I browse different websites every day to collect inspiration, and every project depends on a large amount of reference material."

In 2022, when she began creating videos for social media, digital organization became part of her daily routine.

"Once I started making videos, I realized I needed a reliable personal footage library. Editing depends a lot on how clearly things are sorted. If I know exactly where my materials are and how they're categorized, the whole process becomes much faster. Otherwise, I would spend most of my time just searching for files instead of actually creating," she said.

Today, her system is largely project driven. During active projects, she organizes information as she works, often using collaborative documents to outline each step before gradually filling in details.

For travel and daily life, she follows a structured routine: photos are roughly filtered during trips and fully transferred to a hard drive afterward. Travel materials are sorted by year and month, while everyday content is categorized under themes such as work, family, friends and herself.

She admitted that sorting materials can be exhausting, sometimes leading to delays. Footage from a trip last November, she said, remains untouched.

"If I don't need it immediately, I tend to procrastinate. But when a deadline is near, the pattern reverses. Once I begin organizing, I can sit in front of the computer for an entire day. There's a feeling that I won't be comfortable unless it's finished," she said.

For her, deletion is the most satisfying part of the process.

"Deleting is the most stress-relieving action. Watching the remaining files fall neatly into place brings a strong sense of accomplishment," she said.

Lu, however, resists labeling her behavior as digital hoarding, preferring the term "placing information".

"I don't just keep things for the sake of keeping them. I place information so that I can reinterpret it, reuse it, and make it meaningful at the right moment. But if it's not sorted, it's almost like it doesn't exist," she said.

If all her digital content were to disappear, she believes the hardest loss would not be the files themselves, but the time and effort invested in organizing them.

"I care more about the act of organizing than the result. You have to understand why you are collecting in the first place, and once I defined my real goals, I stopped chasing every opportunity I feared missing and reduced the need to save everything along the way," she said.