A year or so ago, I’ve subscribed to the RSS feed of The Daily Post – a blog that tries to inspire people to blog daily, but providing questions, ideas, and unfinished thoughts. I’ve checking with it once in a while, but often had enough things of my own to write about. Still, I find their variety of subjects interesting. And since, I’ve looked at them today, here is an example – This is your life:
If you could read a book containing all that has happened and will ever happen in your life, would you? If you choose to read it, you must read it cover to cover.
I totally would! I think. Sort of. This is actually quite close to the arguments I held in a recent discussion at work. A few of us in the office were discussing the benefits of finding out the gender of your kid during pregnancy, and doing DNA tests to find out which diseases are more pre-exposed to.
I’ve stood my grounds on the side of: the more information, the better. Since the beginning of times, the human race was trying to find out more information, and then pass it on to the next generations. That’s probably one of the reasons why we are social animals – to get easier access to peer information, and better insure the passing to next generation. Humans have a large brain, and we found amazing ways to use. We’ve started mining for information early on, and came up with ways to organize and communicate information better. From cave drawings, to alphabet, to scrolls and paper, all through to digital. We’ve traveled miles, went into great depths and flew to remote planets – all in the drive for more information.
And then, some choose to not know. I don’t get. I can understand information filtering, when it just becomes too much – not everybody wants a Ph.D. in every single science and art after all. I do understand time and money constraints, when you just cannot afford to learn something, thanks to the costs of modern education. I do even understand fatigue, when you have all the information at your fingertips, but just can’t take it anymore. But when none of this is a factor, when you do have access to the information, and it doesn’t cost you much more to learn it, I cant’ think of a reason not to learn it.
Now, back to that book thing again. I would read it for all the information that it has. If it covers my future, my goods and my bads, and even if it covers my death and after-death – I would read it. I want all that information. The thought that stops me from saying that I would absolutely read all of it cover to cover has to do with time constraints.
I am 34 years old. Even with a rough calculation, that’s over 12,000 days. I haven’t lived all days to the full – sometimes I was sick, sometimes I was lazy, sometimes I just slept a day through. But those weren’t too many. I can probably imagine at least a half a page for each day of my life. That’s a book with 6,000 pages, give or take. I’ve also had quite a few of those days that would need a book of their own. But, for the sake of simplicity, I’m not taking about those now. I’m not the fastest reader. It would probably take me a month or so to read through that. And that’s only up to now. I have no idea for how long the book goes further. Every coupe of days add a page. Do I really want to read for a month a full memory of what happened to me until now? Probably not. I have a blog with over 6,000 posts and I’ve never read it cover to cover, even though I wrote all of it on my own. Sure thing it’s nice to read memories once in a while. As I mentioned before, I do enjoy my ‘On this day …’ widget on the sidebar. But that’s just a 4-5 clicks, not a whole book.
I would probably go for something electronic. Like if I had a blog with all everything that happened or will happen to me, instead of that book, I’d love it more. Just think of that! A full life’s blog archive, with all the tools – search, post calendar, tags, categories, occasional images maybe – and all of that without any work. Someone just gave it to you. I would totally jump on that!
P.S.: Now I think I now why I don’t frequent The Daily Post blog. It’s tricky. They ask a simple question, and it throws me into a long post mode.
