Files and directories feel like the Sun and Earth: they are the eternal foundations, and pretending they don't exist can only make make things worse.
Except files were invented by humans! What if we left our zone of comfort and explored the possibilities?
We live in the world of hierarchical file systems. We juggle named files, named directories, and symbolic links daily. It has been this way since the days of DOS, and it remains this way now. It's just the way it is.
Or is it? Phone operating systems try to hide the underlying file system from the user. Yuck! Or actually, do we really want to manage our files manually? Is it really that fun to decide if the train ticket to FOSDEM goes under the "2023" or "invoices" directory, and in which order? Or do we just want to find the cursed thing when we need it?
Documents have not always been bound to files, and they aren't, and they don't have to be. Put away the Stockholm syndrome, and I'll tell you about semantic desktop, WinFS, alternate streams, [photo managers](https://www.digikam.org/), [Perkeep](https://perkeep.org/), [IPFS](https://ipfs.tech/), and my own plan to ascend.