I was in a paranoid psychotic state a few months back and I delete my whole photo library. About 40GB or my life for the last 15 years.

Looking back now it is no big deal. My burden has lessened and i am still the same man I was.

Exactly. Though when something similar happened to me, and I was able to salvage most of it, the next thing I did was:

discard/reject/delete: ≈400GB → 25GB → 3GB (< a decade ago; I remember) (I was shocked to see how little of that really mattered).

and since then I have been backing up starting from that 3GB set which, more than a decade later, is obviously more now, but the learning was don't let amount of data control/tame you, it should be the other way round. So I can just use multiple PAYG backup destinations without worrying about insane costs.

The amount of photos and videos I took also went astronomically down after that. I realised what I was missing - I had lost the data and for the most part I didn't have many of those scenes/moments to begin with. Because I was busy taking those digital photos and videos.

Of all my possessions, I would discard my photos last.