> There is a lot of overwhelm these days. It's not just our devices: peak tv, never ending YouTube videos, endless tweets, and a web we can never fully explore.

Endless everything. You can even apply qualifiers like "excellent" and still have a set of things that may as well be endless. There's an as-credible-as-one-could-hope-for top-1000 (one thousand!) movies meta-list out there, and there are more really, really good films than can fit on even such a long list. That's about a year of work, as in 40-hour work weeks, watching films, and that's just for one pass, when most of these are the sorts of things that reward repeat viewing. Realistically that's a lifetime of cinema for most people, without watching any low quality content—or anything newer than the first version of that list that was released.

And it's all accessible. The overwhelming majority of the list can be watch with, at worst, a 2-day wait for Prime shipping. You can go ahead and watch ten or so others on streaming services while you wait for that to arrive.

Legitimately-good TV is coming out faster than most people can watch it, unless high-quality TV shows are practically your only entertainment. A giant percentage of all recorded music ever can be accessed in seconds to minutes, and more with the aforementioned 2-day shipping wait.

An idea Vonnegut explored at least a couple times is that recorded media killed the value of (relatively) mundane creative expression by putting everyone in competition with the greats in a given field, and that the lives of those who might have given some joy and been valued by their community for their small talents are deeply, negatively affected by this. Now the greats are constantly in competition with all the other greats, from all time, and our major problem and a source of anxiety is figuring out what's the very best thing out of all these excellent things we can enjoy in each moment. Opinions on those topics are subject to the exact same forces and accessibility, ouroboros-like.

The level of choice is crippling, and I don't think it's actually improving most people's lives over a world with at least a little more friction to flitting between excellent entertainment—the distraction of it all, and its addictive power, both inherent and deliberately added through UI that drives engagement, is probably making things worse in some ways.

Maybe the video store wasn't so bad. Maybe the books at the local library were pretty good. Maybe spending a good long time with one record you picked up and are really enjoying is better than knowing that popular opinion holds it's a middling album by that band, so instead you listen to a plausible top-ten albums in that genre from this year (none of which are by that band you liked... in fact why did you like them if they're so bad? That's embarrassing) once or twice each. Do you feel any better? Is your life actually richer? Can this kind of relationship with media and entertainment even be enriching?

You can still behave like that of course, but damned if the possibility that there's something better, and the near-certaintly of being able to quickly act on new information, isn't a nearly irresistible temptation. Maybe you should google this before you pick it up. What does metacritic say? And so on.

And don't even get me started on data hoarding. Fear of death made manifest in mountains of data we can't hope to process or appreciate. Better go check my backups. May need a bigger drive. Some day I'm totally going to relive my childhood with a marathon of all these pirated tvrips of shows that'll never be released again for licensing reasons. If bitrot or a drive crash eats them or, god forbid, I delete them, I may never find them again and they'll be gone forever—forever! Just like so many things used to be just a couple decades ago, and like everything was that couldn't be written down a century and a half ago, all the way back to the dawn of recorded (!) history. I really should find a couple hundred hours to sort these directories of family photos and pare them down to a smaller, comprehensible set. Maybe move—not delete, then I'd never see them again if I wanted to!—mediocre ones out of the way. Not now though. Just thinking about all of them makes me anxious. Thank god we have them, though, rather than a cherished shoebox full of polaroids. They're so very important.