Too Much Information?

A respected industry colleague was introducing me at ISRI in San Diego, and he mentioned this blog.  It was a very positive mention, but he emphasized that it would take a LOT of time to read it all.  It made me wonder about the importance of keeping things short.

If I read all the posts, periodicals, tweets and leads I subscribe to - from ENN and Grist to Discovery, and keyword leads delivered from New York Times, Consumer Reports, Foxnews, WSJ, and listserves at massrecycle, greenyes, facebook, and greenwala... And also the weekly reports from ISRI and E-Scrap News and Recycling Today... I'd have no more time to do anything, but how much more would I know?  Is the Good Point Ideas Blog contributing to the junk satellites orbiting our heads?

I'm thinkiing about a "virtual MRF" for the delete box... a Mayfran belt to sort the info back out and send them again?  Maybe there is a subset of Twitter, to be called Dittoer... It would do nothing useful except repost something already posted somewhere when you click it, kind of like "retweet".   Completely useless, but massively popular?  I can aspire to better.

I kept a journal regularly through high school and much of the time in college, and was an avid letter writer in Peace Corps.    But in a blog (unlike a funeral eulogy) there is no captive audience and no pretense that anyone is reading anything at all.  It's not like I see people skooching towards the exits, or the mice creeping up to the "back" button.

The hurdle for hippy spiritualists keeping philosophical journals in the 1970s and 80s was deftly described by Chogyam Trungpa as "Spiritual Materialism".   You could write about your discoveries for the purpose of improving yourself, and not recognize that your quest for personal salvation was "selfish" in its own right.  Gathering spritual insight for the purpose of being someone with spiritual insight was a buddhist's Catch-22.

A professional pursuit of spiritualism could have diminishing returns.  My own term was the pursuit of a "shiny conscience".  I prefer Winston Churchill.   If I lived as a hermit and meditated until the clouds came home, I doubted it would be replicable or helpful.  I decided to pursue "karma yoga", or doing something constructive and measurable - setting  up recycling programs to make it easier for other people to recycle. 

Why do I think I have insights worth writing about?  I guess I feel I've had "a foot in every puddle".   I've been a truck driver, regulator, entrepreneur, overseas development professional, politician, investor, and recycler in several commodities.  I was in the trenches getting all the cities into curbside recycling, setting up rural recycling, getting recycling into primary education curriculum... and set up e-waste collections in a "green field" in Vermont without benefit of landfill bans or product stewardship.

Bob Whitcher of Falmouth tried to teach me to "keep it simple stupid."  It doesn't always come naturally.

If nothing more, this blog will avoid adding the same species of fish to the "ewaste groupthink" aquarium.  It should serve to focus and not to distract.