The digital memory is a hardwired failure of lack of differentiation between the important and the trivial. Things that you mentally backgrounded years ago suddenly get chopped up a sprinkled over the landscape in which you are currently moving. It is psychotic.
Automatic settings in the digital world often arise out of a need to filter the noise, to arrive at some semblance of a signal. Inbox Zero can seem like an unattainable target, but if you look at half the crap being piled up continually into stacks of unread missives, you could do without it.
The worst thing for me is – I know there are things that I want under the mass of spam, but manually deleting all that crap is an invitation for repetitive strain injury. There was a point where I thought that in order to stay out ahead of the pack I needed to know every damned thing under the sun, but I was forgetting that staying out ahead of the pack was always more about what I had to say than being able to list off the crap I had consumed.
Originators are obviously consumers – who escapes that trap these days? But sharing cool thoughts you have that are yours, really makes you a little different. The things are unread and they have had little impact on where I am at or where I am going – doesn’t make them or me any less cool.