The garbage collector frees memory that is no longer reachable.
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The garbage collector frees memory that is no longer reachable. The premise is that some references are alive and some are dead, and the dead ones should be cleared so the living ones can breathe. This is also a description of an inbox, an archive, a relationship.
Systems that never forget accrue weight. Every retained reference is a small obligation to remember. At scale, the obligation becomes a structural cost — slower lookups, larger surfaces, more places for an error to hide.
Forgetting is not failure. Forgetting is maintenance. Design the schedule on which your systems — and your habits — are allowed to drop what they are no longer using.
