The only area where I believe in excess is in regards to hard drive space.
I don't think people should have gadgets with features they don't use or cars they don't drive or rooms in their house that they never enter. I don't think you should pay more for a haircut than you would for a pair of jeans, another area where excess is frequent, but when it comes to the amount of hard drive space in your computer I refuse to accept that there can ever be too much.
I travel in many circles, and if you were to plot myself if a Venn diagram as to my standing in each of them, the largest overlap would encircle "computer guy." People I know are often asking me for advice or suggestions in buying computers, and I often find myself talking them down from buying over-bloated power-monsters the sheer potential of which they could never hope to near, but with hard drive space I always say go for broke. Go for the most you can afford before it seems ridiculous, I say.
There's an element of practicality to it, of course, but I suppose it's more of a comfort exercise, like paying a bill three times in one month just so you won't have to worry about it for the next two. It's not just overall hard drive space I need, it's the free space.
The laptop I'm typing this on has a 120GB hard drive (not counting the 500GB external drive used for Time Machine backups), and I just looked and saw that there's about 56GB free, so I'm freaking out. I need to start deleting stuff. Why? I'm insane, perhaps, but that 120GB seems a lot less impressive when there's 64 already being used. I prefer to not need to even worry about it. Thus, my rule of excess.
On my desktop computer, a machine I'm beginning to loathe since I've converted to the the light side, I've been ripping my DVDs to Xvid video files and storing them there so I can watch them on my TV with my Xbox 360, as I find I'm much more likely to watch a movie if I have a digital version and don't have to open disk cases or eject DVD trays. Since I'm a bit of a quality nut and have been encoding these video files at about double the filesize most pirates stick to, I've blown through the 160GB hard drive designated for that task pretty quickly.
Today I bought a 1TB external drive for a pretty decent price, so instead of having a 90% full drive I have a 90% empty one. For that, it feels like something bound around my chest has been removed and I'm free to breathe easily again. One TB, for those not staffed to the Starship Enterprise, is one terrabyte. One trillion bytes. Seven-hundred-fifty-thousand floppy disks. Even as recent as 10th grade (I'm afraid to calculate that in "years ago") the terrabyte was this distant, unattainable measure to be thrown around with no regard for reality, like jiggabte. That I own something that had "terrabyte" casually printed on the box blows my mind, yet of course I'm nervous about the eventual day when I've filled it up and I have to decide whether to start deleting things like all 7 seasons of The West Wing (56GB) to make that 1TB seem impressive.
Why doesn't 1TB of data seem as impressive as 1TB of free space? Excess or potential.
Excess: Would you rather have one million dollars or one million dollars worth of stuff? Statistically, you'd rather have the money. It's stupid, and one of the things that makes humans so illogical (and thus, human).
Potential: Would you rather be 100 years old and able to look back at everything you've accomplished in life, or 10 years old again and able to look forward at everything you could accomplish? One is more practical, the other is superficially appealing but ultimately unrewarding. Of course, we'd all go for superficial and unrewarding just to be 10 again. Also illogical.
So there I am, doubly illogical and dripping with excess. My 1TB drive will stay 1TB no matter how full it is, my life will stay the same no matter what I do with it. Do I guardian the "free space" left in my lifetime, trying to stay 21 forever, or do I try to see what I can accomplish with the space I've got left? I can always buy more hard drives or reformat and start from scratch. I can't unflip the bits in my life. Everything that's happened before now is flagged read-only and archive. Some is flagged hidden, too.
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