I make a lot of lists. To Do lists. Gratitude lists. Packing lists and things-to-see lists for trips. Ingredient lists for recipes. Key points lists in preparation for a meeting. Places I have been. Concerts I have attended. On and on.
I once kept track of how many bowls of Grape Nuts cereal I ate in one year. (Five bowls on New Year’s Day alone!)
Similar to lists, I also log and track activities, exercise, meals, songs played by favorite radio stations, and all sorts of ephemera. There is no real purpose or intent other than it grants immediate satisfaction simply noting occurrences and another when revisiting these logs and remembering events.
Throughout college, I tracked how many classes I attended, days I drank, if I completed the NYT puzzle, what I read, what record I bought, when I shaved, what I did, and who I saw… all diligently noted in the calendar book.
It was only appropriate that my first job out of college was as a researcher gathering data and tracking the results of experimentation.
Research led to data modeling and computing led to an interest in programming and database design.
One of the first databases I created — after the one for my music collection — was an attempt at capturing my life experience in tables with rows and rows of data encapsulating all the lists and lists and lists I had made and continued to make anew.
All the addresses of where I lived; the phone numbers of my residences; my height & my weight at different ages; people I knew as friends, family, colleagues, random encounters; jobs I held, and how much I made; books I owned, books I had read; movies seen; cities, states, countries visited; rounds of golf played — and the scores!
The manual effort required and the “administrative” burden this demanded seems silly in the age of technology that offers tools to automate so much of this now. Google Timeline tracks where I have been; social media logs interactions with others; Strava records my rides, walks, and workouts; apps note nutrition, finances, wellness, schedules, miles flown, hours worked — did I miss anything?
All this data is collected, to sum up a life. But perhaps, in the end, all this equates to nothing much — but I’ll keep doing it!
“The ‘Cosmic Integral’: which means that the summation of man from minus infinity to plus infinity is nothing – or, in general terms, that mankind, over the whole course of time, adds up to a blank.”
– Donald Crowhurst
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