Oh CRAP!

Children raised in today's high tech world should all be required to go through classes which teach them to filter and organize CRAP.

Frankly, I'm sick of of it. The thing with CRAP is that it lashes out at you every single chance it gets. CRAP invades your life whether you like it or not. It slowly but surely proceeds to take over it like a disease takes over your body. In fact, it is quite a bit like the common cold in that it comes back every now and then and you have to fight it off. So what is CRAP?

CRAP stands for Curiously Redundant Annoying Paralyzer. 

I can't even begin to tell you how deeply I loathe CRAP. The further we get into the information age, the more we have to deal with it. So what exactly is CRAP?

CRAP is the magazine you got through the mail and have kept it around falsely believing that one day you'll read it - like all the other ones.

CRAP is the old coat you have in your closet which may not be moth-infested, but you refuse to get rid of it for one reason or another.

CRAP is the extra set of utensils you got for Christmas from your mother-in-law, but actually never use because ...well...it's crap.

CRAP is the web page you bookmarked yesterday, which you'll probably never read in your entire life, but it's in there with 2000 others.

I think the problem of CRAP is quite serious. Information overload is one thing, but the physical CRAP that's all around us is seriously overwhelming. It has a devastating impact on our environment, our health, and our mental well-being.

In a world of overabundance, we continue to look for more CRAP to buy in order to satisfy...

To satisfy what? To satisfy whom?

There used to be a time when people fixed things. Now we just scrap it and go out to buy a new piece of CRAP.

Now don't get me wrong, as an ardent supporter of anything high-tech I do like some of this CRAP, but I've come to the conclusion that there are a myriad of things I have at home which I could do without. There are things I keep around the house which I'm afraid of throwing away, hoping that one day I could put them to use.

It's not even a question of right and wrong. It's a question of how to deal with it properly. How much time do we have to spend to keep all this CRAP organized?

Perhaps the best way is to establish a system of dealing with CRAP on a daily basis and simply de-crap just as take a shower and throw out the trash. The problem is that the sheer volume of it has increased x-fold and dealing with it now takes more time.

I've come up with a solution of how to keep our computer decluttered automatically, but that's in the next post. Till then, I hope to get rid of as much CRAP as possible before I move this month.