Saturation Point

Do you ever feel like there's just too much of everything these days?

Granted, it's nice to be able to have your choice of gasoline, grocery store, bran cereal, dining room sets, aspirin, condoms, salt & pepper shakers...you get the picture. And sometimes, I feel like there's just too much stuff in the world - and too many people.

I felt it acutely this weekend, when my southern parents-in-law were here. They're from a place where the population decreases every year, thus over-crowding is hardly a problem. So they come to Chicago, where they find that I-80 has turned into a parking lot at 2 p.m., and you have to stand in line for everything.

Obviously, you have to expect a long line for the Shedd Aquarium on the Saturday after a baby beluga whale is born. However, I just feel icky inside when everything worth doing is in such high demand that you spend more time waiting in lines than you do in the museums themselves.

And these days, it seems like every twelve-year-old with a modem has a blog, MySpace page, eBay account, and Facebook profile. The Internet is simply oversaturated with pages to see - as was pointed out on NPR today by the "curators" of the Museum of Online Museums, who catalog online collections and selectively pick the best ones to visit. Wikipedia, the world's largest source of online information, is edited every day by people ranging from college professors to high school drop-outs.

How do you filter the useful from the merely superfluous?

There has always been more to see and do in the world than people can accomplish in their lifetimes. However, the gap between what we can see and what we can't is only getting larger as time goes on - and as more and more people contribute to the information superhighway.

I really don't have any solution for this problem of too many people, too much stuff, too much information. I'm thinking that if people don't start adopting some sort of zero-population-growth family planning soon, there's got to be a plague on the way that'll knock out a certain percentage of the population. Hey, it's historical fact, people!

Sure, that's a horrible way for Mother Nature to regulate the population of humans on Earth, but she'll figure out some way to do it. And if I'm still around afterward, I'll certainly enjoy the shorter lines.