They say the first step to solving a problem is to admit that you have a problem. I have a problem: I’ve got a raging case of “I’ll read that eventually”-itis.
By no means am I a hoarder. I just get behind in my reading. Life takes over, something moderately decent shows up on TV, I stupidly take a very badly constructed design class which takes twice as long as it should each week, and I get behind. Yeah, I’ll generally read something when it shows up but the fact is that if I set something aside I’m probably not going to read it anytime within the natural lifespan of the material. So, I’ll put it aside.
And it stays aside until the pile of aside gets to big, or is too inconveniently placed and I move it somewhere out of sight…and then I forget about it. Sometimes years pass before I get back to said stack of reading material. If you look at the 30lbs of assorted periodicals I put in the recycling bin this afternoon 2005 was my lost year for The Utne Reader and 2010 was my lost year for Wired.
I have to say in my own defense that I don’t save things randomly or just by chronology. The copies of The Utne Reader that went into the bin all had articles about happiness, focus, or serenity on their covers. In order to keep from becoming a hoarder there’s no question six year-old magazines need to go.
The thing of it is, I hesitated when I dropped into the recycle bin those magazines purporting to detail the secret to happiness or the way to find more focus and purpose in your life. What if they do have the secret to happiness? What if they can help me find more focus, more time, more energy, more creativity?
As they dropped from my hand my rational mind kicked in: if those secrets had been found and published, wouldn’t they be all over the Internet by now?
The only good thing about this is that by clearing up and cleaning out I have a chance to start over. I have a chance to reduce every time a magazine comes up for renewal. How often to you get a new chance on a regular basis?
Oh, I know how this feels! I subscribe to two weekly magazines, The Economist and New Scientist. I love both, but find the former to be more than I can digest in a week, especially as I’m really keen on knowing something about events outside of the continent. I was so glad to see the Onion’s commentary on this:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/the-economist-to-halt-production-for-month-to-let,20090/
I haven’t read Utne since the early 90s, but I assume it’s got more depth than, say, Bicycling Magazine, which I swear runs the same content every other year. “Top 3 diet tips that will make you want to replace your perfectly functional bicycle with one of our advertiser models that’s 23 grams lighter!”
This is exactly why when I offer TGF a gift subscription to The Economist I receive a polite decline. I’m down to Utne, Wired, The Week, Bitch Magazine, and PC World. I picked up Mother Jones recently, though, so something else is going to have to go.