"In the future, there will be so much going on that no one will be able to keep track of it."
--David Byrne, "In the Future", from The Knee Plays
I love Instapaper. It helped solve the "20 browser tabs open" problem where you click on something interesting to read - but it turns out to be kinda long, and you don't have time to read it right now. In fact, you don't really want to read it on your work computer at all; you'd rather pull it up on your tablet in your living room with a fire going in the fireplace and a glass of Dogfish Head 60-Minute IPA at your side. Consequently, I tend to have a fairly long list of interesting articles queued up to read at any given time, lovely articles from The Atlantic and Slate and The New Yorker and Vanity Fair and Wired and Rolling Stone and qz.com and the like.
However, the Instapaper articles compete with digital issues of Newsweek, which are full of articles about NEWS which come out EVERY SINGLE WEEK. I'm usually about 6-8 issues behind, which means that I can sometimes skip articles because the Big Question they're asking has been answered, or is no longer relevant at all.
Newsweek and Instapaper, of course, compete for my reading time with books, still mostly paper but some digital. Authors have this annoying habit of writing books on fascinating subjects that I can't wait to dive into, and so those titles are added to the list I keep on a Google Drive spreadsheet, which is also more or less duplicated in a Goodreads account. Many of these books have been purchased and sit there, waiting to be read as soon as I can get around to them.
If I don't feel like reading, no problem - TiVo dutifully records all kinds of interesting TV programs, hours and hours and hours worth, more than my wife and I could ever hope to watch. Lately, an "AFI's List of 100 Greatest Movies" smart search thingy has intersected with an enhanced cable subscription that gives us Turner Classic Movies, and the TiVo lit up like a pinball machine, recording "Casablanca" and "Citizen Kane" and "The African Queen" and "Bringing Up Baby" and "Platoon" and "The Last Picture Show" and so on and so on.
If we're not in the mood for something on TiVo, Netflix has us covered - there are maybe 50 movies and a few TV series in the queue there. Who knows if we'll ever get around to watching them? Actually, I know - we'll never get around to watching them all. And that's not including the dozens of TV shows or movies that my friends tell me I MUST watch - how could I be missing out on Game of Thrones or Fargo or The Walking Dead or Adventure Time or Girls or Black-ish or Doctor Who or The Knick, etc, etc, etc.
Meanwhile, when I'm exercising or driving or doing mundane household chores or just lying sick in bed, there are the podcasts. I've discovered I'm something of a podcast junkie. It is so, so easy to subscribe to a new one, promising hours and hours of interesting listening - techie podcasts like Hanselminutes and .NET Rocks; wonky podcasts like Planet Money and Freakonomics and The Commonwealth Club of California; the Slate Political and Culture gabfests; Marc Maron's WTF interviews, and just damned interesting podcasts like Radiolab and 99% Invisible. I'm months behind on some of those.
This may be the ultimate First World Problem. There is so much quality content being produced, by so many amazingly talented writers/thinkers/researchers/producers/directors/actors/singers/playwrights/I/could/go/on/and/on that I occasionally stress out that I'm not consuming it fast enough. Each separate stream of content threatens to become its own to-do list to be worked through as quickly and efficiently as possible, like Lucy and Ethel wrapping candies at the conveyor belt.
I have, sometimes, learned to let go, not worry about all of it piling up, and just cherry-pick the best stuff .This doesn't solve the larger problem, however, which is that consuming all this stuff - as great as it can be - is not the same as creating something or doing something. Yes, I am an info-junkie, but i have to remember to put that information to good use in the service of action, not merely learning for learning's sake, as attractive as that can be.
