The Unencrypted Life
I live in the chasm between two worlds. By day, I’m a full-time supervisor for a critical IT team, managing systems that cannot fail. By night, I’m at an apartment complex, hauling the things people gave up on. Most people avoid sitting in a pile of their own trash because it’s a physical manifestation of a day they’re finished with. But looking at what we discard has made me realize: our relationship to our garbage is the most honest data we produce.
In IT, we talk about data sanitization and end-to-end encryption. We build firewalls to protect the digital versions of ourselves. But at night, that security disappears. A trash bag is the most honest, unencrypted file ever created. It’s a thin plastic boundary between who people pretend to be and who they actually are. I don’t need a password to see the story of your week; I just need to lift the bag—and most nights, I don’t even need to do that.
It’s a dirty job, but more than the three-week lasagna sliding awkwardly out of an untied bag, I see what people think is gone. I’m the silent auditor of the physical cache—recovering the files you thought you deleted.
It’s humanizing to see what we consider disposable. Most of it is discarded with zero thought for who handles it next. I don’t want to romanticize it; trash isn't poetry. It’s the world’s version of pooping what you eat—and looking at the bags I haul every night, we ain’t eating great. We're obsessed with the front-end 'user experience' of our lives, but I'm the one managing the messy back-end where the real truth leaks out.
We can't shift our diet overnight, but we could at least tie the bag so we don't spill the Christmas ham on the sidewalk. When you toss a bag, it’s exiting your life, but to the raccoons at the dumpster, it’s manna from the heavens. Your trash should at least stay yours. In a world obsessed with digital privacy, maybe the first step to owning our lives again is simply making sure our garbage doesn't belong to the world.
Word Count: ~415 words
Approximate Read Time: 1 minute, 45 seconds