There definitely is a sort of pseudo generational gap of how peole interact with computers. I was having a conversation with a 20ish year old the other day about computer for storage and they didn't understand the filing cabinet analogy. Like, for then everything had to be in the desktop folder, but the concept that C:\Users\User\Desktop was like having a folder in a filing cabinet, where C: was the actual cabinet, was so alien to them.

Windows seems to make this deliberately confusing, eg displaying "Desktop" as the root of the hierarchy in the default Explorer window makes no sense (Desktop > Home > Desktop?). Then layer in typical corporate MS software like OneDrive, and it gets even weirder and harder to determine what's where on the local fs.

Then, you have Personal which is using OneDrive and everything else. If you have Google Drive or Dropbox then it shows up too.

Lots of options, plenty of opportunity for confusion.

That's by design. They don't want you to store your files locally. They want you to store them in the cloud... their cloud.

My parents use their email inbox as a filing system. Specifically, a top of bucket filing system. They need something? Email it to them. Did you email it to them? Email again. They can find it if (and only if) it's near the top of their inbox.

A special kind of insanity that puts me in a mild, cold sweat. Such filesystems can come for your family too!

Worth noting, my father was an early adopter of the home computer. It's somehow regressed over the years.

The desktop metaphor makes it look like the desktop is the starting point. You can understand why someone who has not interacted with a directory through a terminal would think this.

Be glad you've gone through life without having a partner or friend that just puts everything on the desktop.

And then complains to you all their files have disappeared.

Usually it's because they've run out of diskspace and windows has created a temporary profile for them (which is crazy default behaviour when you think about it). Not sure if that's still a thing.

Of course they just closed the popup saying "you're running low on diskspace" last week. After all, what are they supposed to do about that?

I save everything to my desktop and when it gets too messy, move the stuff I'm done with to a folder called archive. If I'm looking for something recent, it's on my desktop, else it's in my archive folder. Works pretty well for me.

I was married to someone for over 20 years who did that. She got told to stop doing it at work as well years ago because it took 40 minutes to copy her profile on login/logout.

I often ask myself, where _would_ I put such a thing. Rarely do I have to check more than two or three directories before finding the document I'm looking for, when I pretend that I'm looking for a place to file it now.

I'm wondering if you're either a savant or just have very few documents?

The more documents you have, the more likely you are to have strict classifications. The stricter the classifications the more likely you are to run into something like Russell's paradox.