I like audio books and listen steadily while driving. Right now, we are listening to "Home Safe" by Elizabeth Berg. Audible.com is a branch of Amazon.com and they recently had a sale on books. Getting ready to download the files in iPods caused me to look over my hard disk and see about freeing up some space.
Hard disk extensions are pretty inexpensive now. You can buy one thousand gigabytes (a terabyte) for $150. But it still makes sense to look over what is on our machines and consider deleting what is out-of-date, unneeded, etc. The computer, the Kindle and the iPod all have large capacities that invite unfettered acquisition. Whether it is money or food or social contacts or land or houses or boats or something else, certain tools and setups enable us to acquire things madly and quickly. Whether we will ever actually use them is a different question. With the click of a mouse, we can buy land in Korea or South America or several books a minute or more songs and operas than we have ever owned.
The situation is similar to having affordable self-storage bins near your house where you can store all manner of material. Once it is stored, you can go out and get more! Wahoo! More lawn chairs, extra charcoal grills, the old tent that hasn't been used for 20 years, etc. But, when you get down to it, there is no ultimate good. There is nothing you can use endless amounts of. It all becomes superfluous waste eventually.
Some fairy tales and thinkers have postulated that the highest good is power, the business of telling the fairy that your first wish is to have an unlimited supply of wishes. I noticed the Robin William genie in "Alladin" says, "Ixnay on wishing for more wishes".
There is a good chance that I am within a score of years of my death. So, it is easy for me to think that too many cars might include a few that I never drive. I might already own more books than I am going to read. But the same was true for me when I was 15 years old. The key number was bigger but it wasn't infinite. It is true that we can get along with very little in life but even luxuries - everything - has limits of time, space, memory and use.
