We Hit Delete on Years of Our Life Online — Here's What We Found Underneath

Last spring, we did something that felt a little radical at the time: we sat down with a spreadsheet, a lot of coffee, and the full archive of everything we'd ever posted online, and we started deleting things.

Not because we were embarrassed. Not because anything had blown up or gone sideways. We did it because we'd slowly started to feel like strangers in our own digital house — surrounded by content that didn't really reflect us anymore, but that we'd never had the courage to actually let go of.

What followed was equal parts cathartic, uncomfortable, and genuinely surprising. Here's the honest version of how it went.

How We Got Here

We'd been building this site and our social presence for a few years before we realized we had a problem. The problem wasn't bad content, exactly. It was more like... accumulated sediment. Old posts from a time when we were figuring out our voice. Photos that felt performative in retrospect. Opinions we'd shared confidently that we now held a lot more loosely.

The internet has a long memory, and we'd been feeding it without much intention. At some point, the sheer volume of stuff we'd put out there started to feel heavy. A reader once sent us a message referencing something Benny had written years ago — something he barely remembered writing — and we both just looked at each other like, yeah, we need to deal with this.

So we blocked off three weekends and got to work.

The Framework We Used to Decide What Stays

We didn't go in with a machete. That would've been satisfying in the moment but probably not smart. Instead, we came up with a loose set of questions we'd ask about each piece of content before making a call.

Does this still represent how we think or who we are? This one sounds simple, but it's actually the hardest. Growth is good, but publicly documenting every stage of your growth means some of your older thinking is just... out there, searchable, being read by people who have no context for where you were at the time.

Would we be comfortable with a stranger reading this today, cold? Not a friend who knows us — a stranger. That reframe changed a lot of our decisions.

Is the value of keeping it up greater than the cost? Some older posts still get traffic. Some of them still say something useful. The question was whether that utility outweighed any discomfort we had with the content.

Is this a moment we'd want to preserve, or just a moment we documented? There's a difference. Not everything that got published deserved to be published in the first place — we were just less discerning back then.

What Actually Got Cut

We ended up removing or significantly editing about 30% of our archive. That's more than we expected going in.

A lot of what went were posts from our early days that were trying too hard — the kind of content where you can feel the desperation for relatability in every sentence. Some of it was travel content that painted places in ways that felt reductive now. A few posts were just... bad. Thin. We were filling a publishing schedule more than we were saying anything worth saying.

We also removed some personal stuff that, in retrospect, we never should have made public in the first place. Arguments that made it into posts in a thinly veiled way. Moments of vulnerability that felt brave to share at the time but that we now recognize as oversharing. Personal details about people in our lives who never asked to be part of our story.

That last category was the most important one. When you document your life publicly, you inevitably document the lives of the people around you. We weren't always careful about that, and the audit made us reckon with it directly.

The Emotional Part Nobody Warns You About

Here's the thing about deleting years of your own content: it feels like losing something, even when you're choosing to let it go.

Benny had a harder time with this than Katie did. He's more sentimental about documenting things — one of the reasons we started doing this in the first place. Looking back at old posts, even the cringey ones, felt like going through a box of old photos. There's something in there you want to hold onto, even if the photo itself isn't great.

Katie was more ruthless, which was probably what we needed. Her take was that we weren't deleting the experiences — just the documentation of them. The memories don't live in the posts. That reframe helped Benny a lot, honestly.

We also had to navigate the fact that we sometimes disagreed about what should go. There were a few posts that one of us wanted to keep and the other didn't. We made a rule early on: if either of us is uncomfortable with something staying up, it comes down. No debate needed. That made the process feel safer.

What We Learned About Our Digital Footprint

Going through the archive with fresh eyes taught us things about ourselves that we genuinely hadn't noticed while we were in the middle of it all.

We could see patterns in what we were drawn to document — and what we consistently avoided. We could see the periods when we were happy and when we were stressed, even in posts that weren't explicitly about either. We could see the moments when we were performing for an audience versus actually communicating something real.

Your digital footprint isn't just a record of what you did. It's a record of who you were trying to be. And sometimes those two things are pretty different.

What We'd Tell Anyone Thinking About Doing This

Start with the oldest stuff. It's easier to make decisions about things that feel further away from who you are now.

Don't do it alone if you're a couple who creates together. You both need to be part of the conversation, and you'll catch things the other person misses — or is too close to see clearly.

Give yourself permission to just archive things privately rather than delete them entirely. Some things don't need to be public, but that doesn't mean they need to be gone forever.

And finally: you don't owe anyone a complete record of your becoming. The internet can make you feel like your history belongs to your audience. It doesn't. You get to curate your own story.

The purge took us about six full days of work spread across those three weekends. What we ended up with was a cleaner, more intentional archive — and, weirdly, a renewed sense of purpose about what we actually want to put out into the world going forward.

Turns out, knowing what you want to keep teaches you a lot about what you want to create.