Is variety a bad thing? Maybe it’s just that too much variety is a bad thing. Everything in moderation, right?

Too many things to focus on, too many things to think about, sensory overload… What do I mean by this? The problem is that there isn’t enough time to devote a fair amount of time to be able to appreciate any one thing.

I wonder if that’s why some “classic” movies, books, and plays for example, are so loved even though they may not hold up today. Either people had more time to appreciate them -or- the sheer quantity of content being produced nowadays simply outweighs the amount previously created, thereby producing ample opportunities of something being better. I understand that things are iterative and that we learn from the past to make the future better but still, there’s some part of me that thinks that people -not so long ago- had more time to appreciate things more than folks today.

They spent time with things. They learned about things and consumed things. They appreciated them fully before moving on to something else (if they moved on) sometimes based purely on lack of variety. The little girl who spent all week sowing her dolly together put extra care and love into creating that object and probably felt much more of a connection and appreciation for it over the child today who sees an isle full of plastic doll parts and picks one at random just to play with it for a few days then to throw it on the pile.

How many different kinds of toilet paper are available today? How many different books, movies, video games, food, music, etc. are out there? There is a very finite amount of time to consume these things and it’s physically impossible to be able to do so in any one lifetime. Furthermore, how much time do we waste deciding on which one we’re going to consume? If we could devote that wasted time deciding on which thing we want and apply that to the actual product, I think we’d enjoy life a lot more.

I thought about this today while gazing outside at a blue cloudless sky. We’ve had overcast skies for months now. I realized that I sometimes love overcast days. I love drizzly mornings where I can curl up on the couch and stare out the window and watch the world pass by. I thought about how an overcast sky erases half of our field of view. From our viewpoint, there is a sky above us and an equal amount of earth below us. Once you color the former completely grey and remove all variety, the size of our world becomes half as big. This sounds like this would be a bad thing, but then I think about how many times I’ve thought about something new or made a new discovery simply because I was forced to pay attention to what’s down here in front of me; as opposed to everything down here and everything up there.

There’s a growing movement of people who are trying to ‘de-clutter’ their lives. There’s a simplistic, modern movement happening where people are getting rid of things and removing unnecessary distractions from their lives in order to remain focused on things they deem important so they can devote more energy to things they love. For me it would be a ‘function over fashion’ thing, or maybe more of a ‘things I need’ versus a ‘things I want’ thing. But being able to determine the difference is the difficult part.

I don’t know, maybe I’m being a little dramatic. But when I think about all the books I want to read and video games I want to play then think about how much time I have, there’s no way I can ever hope to accomplish a fraction of that. Heck, there are books I own and know will probably have an impact on my life that I just can’t seem to find the time to finish.

Not only that, coming out of the holiday season and seeing the consumerism that surrounds us all can be pretty depressing. Sure, having things is fun and nice, but genuinely enjoying them is the point. (Genuinely enjoying each other is more to the point, but that’s another story.)

Are our lives too complicated? Are our phones and emails and tablets and streaming content necessary? –I’m aware of the hypocrisy as I write this on my laptop where I’ll post this on my website to make it available to the global network that is The Internet, but it’s still something I think about from time to time. But, I bought two college-ruled composition books yesterday which I hope to fill in the coming years with ‘posts’ just like this.

Yes the world is too complicated -for me anyway- and keeping a personal journal is a start. I already keep a handwritten log in the observatory every time I go observing, and I have this digital log here on the website… but I think a personal handwritten log will ‘slow things down’ a little and grant a little extra time for reflection… and appreciating that one thing a little more.