Downsizing

[bjarvis]

This is downsizing as in discarding useless material, not dieting or being laid off by my corporate overlords.

One the advantages of being in the upper end of middle class and a homeowner is that one has the luxury of accumulating material objects. I'm not sentimental about many things but I do have strong emotional attachment to past work, including papers, computers and the accoutrement of one's daily workspace.

As I write this, I realize that nearly 1/3 of all of the shelf space around me is occupied by my handwritten notes from various classes and courses. Each was carefully sorted & filed during the time of the course, then lovingly shelved in chronological order when the course was complete so that I could look up the information again readily if the need should arise.

The time has come to acknowledge that after 20+ years in some instances, these volumes and binders will never be touched again. And I really need the shelf space for more timely items.

I keep lots of digital sediment as well but at least the memory capacity of my PDAs over the years has grown faster than my needs. There's no earthly reason why I still have the courses taken each semester of my BSc and MSc years ago but it doesn't take up more than one kilobyte out of a 32GB device so there's no harm done.

I'm not sure why I'm feeling a need to deal with this tonight but I see no profit in waiting.

Comments

[woofpup.livejournal.com]

I went through the same process when we moved into our condo. Although I'd never really referenced any of the old notes and course work from college and grad school, they reminded me of a time when I used to actually know all this stuff! My ability to solve partial differential equations or calculate electromagnetic fields near the event horizon of a black hole is pretty well non-existent and, fortunately, not required.