"Too Many Needles"

In the bad old days of the Internet, finding what you were looking for was, well, like searching for a needle in a haystack. Clay Shirky called it “filter failure”. And now, the pendulum has swung to the other extreme of “filter success” as Nicholas Carr calls it. (Think of the effect of Google search, or the recos of Amazon and Netflix). But that’s just created a new problem, writes Oliver Burkemann - the “Too many needles” problem:

“(You have) a large pile (or digital equivalent) of books or articles you've been meaning to get around to reading, plus maybe a long queue of podcast episodes to which you'd love to listen, if only you had the time.”

 

Burkemann says this is a broader problem most people face. It occurs outside the digital/ Internet domain, in pretty much every aspect of life:

“If you're blessed with work you love, or a creative passion you're good at, you may often feel torn between multiple projects you're excited to launch. Others are the familiar problems of Life Under Late Capitalism™, like the feeling that there's simply not enough time in the day to be a good parent while staying afloat financially. What they all have in common is that the things you're choosing between all genuinely matter.”

 

Is there a solution? Yes, the one you always knew of but kept hoping wasn’t really the solution:

“It's not a question of rearranging your to-do list so as to make space for all your "big rocks", but of accepting that there are simply too many rocks to fit in the jar. You have to take a stab at deciding what matters most, among your various creative passions/life goals/responsibilities – and then do that, while acknowledging that you'll inevitably be neglecting many other things that matter too.”

 

That’s very unsatisfying, and yet it has its benefits:

“Coming at life this way definitely entails tough choices. But it's liberating, too, as you slowly begin to grasp that you never had any other option. There's no point beating yourself up for failing to clear a backlog (of unread books, undone tasks, unrealized dreams) that it was always inherently unfeasible to clear in the first place.”

Sometimes Mission Impossible is just what the name says – it’s impossible.