Estremera: Always more than we need

Saturday, January 14, 2012

THAT tablets, whether iPads, Blackberry Playbook, or Galaxy Tabs that more and more friends are having has further convinced me of a human’s penchant to hoard.

A friend has downloaded more magazines than she can read and yet still believes she can in some future time, another has stocked up on books she intends to read and have already read but has not opened any one of them beyond skimming through when she first downloaded them, while another is on constant watch for free games and yet managing to play only one favorite. Walang time.

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The frenzy to search for what’s downloadable has made a parody of another friend’s agony of having more real books than she ever could read even way into the far future. For this friend, while the desire remains to buy books, she has to control herself with all her might simply because she has ran out of physical space. The physical space that limits is now opened wide by technology because in this time and age, you can download just about anything you can and stock these in external hard drives that are as small as your wallet but with a capacity measured in terabytes. We couldn’t even count up to one trillion and now memory measures things in terabytes, worse, the numbers are ringing up to peta, exa, zetta, yotta, bronto, and geop, prefixes we never ever new existed before we all got hooked on multimedia.

Like what?

Okay, that small thingy memory card you put in your camera phone has a capacity measured in megabytes or mb, where an mb is 1,000 kilobytes (which means a thousand-one thousand or one million). Add three more zeros to your mb and you get the giga, plus three more zeroes you get tera, plus three more is peta, down the line, you get exa, zetta, yotta, bronto, and geop. That’s a lot of zeroes…

The mere thought of having this access to memory space that even our own memory can ever store in our whole lifetime, we hoard, and hoard, while the memory maker just cranks up the capacity in smaller and smaller packages – to sell.

With just a terabyte PDF books, you have practically a library that can put the giant university libraries to shame. But then, whoever managed to wade through one whole university library?

At the University of the Philippines in Diliman alone, getting to know the UP Library through its card catalogue before required one whole session in the freshman orientation. Despite that, many still got lost in the maze of information, and yet these are information that has been catalogued. How many people are there who knows about cataloguing and create a similar one in their personal hard drives? Maybe a nerd or two. The rest of us will just be skimming around our latest acquisitions, forgetting the mountains of information we have filed before that.

And thus, life just becomes even more complicated and searching for a quote or two you skimmed through will be an impossible task best set aside, to be forgotten.

The wiser ones would realize how hoarding all those information makes for clutter and nothing else and yet is costing thousands of pesos as each terabyte hard drive runs up to such. The wiser ones upon realizing this will make a conscious effort to stop, purge, and just gather the essentials. The rest will just be buying more terabytes in the belief that more is better or that there will come a time when he or she can open and pour into all those files.

But wait, humanity has been over this landscape before, where a billionaire or two through the ages have given up their billions to live a simple life, to be in better touch with the soul with a consciousness uncluttered by life’s complications and noise.

The rest just plod on, aspiring to be billionaires or trillionaires of stored unused information.

Are we but in a transition because of the novelty of being able to store so much or are we entering yet a life that has so many pitstops and distractions? I say, no. Because for as long as there is something to sell, some bright guy will be cranking up the numbers, with us, gullible materialistic beings drooling over the capacity to gather more than we really need.

The simple life, indeed, has become more complicated to find, but only because we opted to drown ourselves unnecessarily.

Me? I still have to make sense of my files beyond what I thought a decade ago was a good way of cataloguing them – through dates. After ten years, what I thought was the most uncomplicated manner has become a thick, impenetrable wall of numbers that only give a hint on what is inside but never a clear idea of what it was and why it’s there.

I guess it’s time to purge and let go… if only I have the time to check which ones are worthy to be held on to… as yet another decade piles up.

saestremera@yahoo.com