Progress

Inventions are a funny thing. I know the overall premise of inventions are to make life “easier” but they should come with a big disclaimer that they won’t necessarily save a person much time.

While I wouldn’t give up my laptop for a typewriter, I can’t even count the number of hours that “technical difficulties” have eaten up my days.  And just when I start counting on my cell phone to be a GPS device, the battery dies and I drive all over yonder wondering where the heck I am.

What kills me about such progress, especially in the arena of housework, is that for all the things that get invented each year to supposedly make cleaning house easier, housework ends up taking longer and longer because someone keeps raising the standard of “clean.”

I had great grandparents that grew up with dirt floors, so what’s the point of a broom?  When the dirt floors went away, a broom became vital, but then came the mop and now I am faced with anti-bacterial floor cleaner.  Do I really need to keep my floors free from bacteria?  I don’t even hold to the three-second rule.  If food hits my floor, I throw it out.  

Progressive inventions don’t just frustrate my house cleaning efforts – they’ve invaded my hobbies as well.  I love taking photographs.  I have shelf upon shelf full of photo albums I’ve been keeping since high school.  I’ve always used “instamatic” cameras, as the complexities of shutter speed, f-stops and apertures never quite found a place in my brain, so the “auto” feature on cameras works just fine for me.  But since photos went digital, which was supposed to be an improvement in my life, I’ve found I’m drowning in my own shutterbug stew.

Organizing and looking for photos has got to be the biggest time sucker of any activity I do, because housework just isn’t that high on my priority list. I take far too many photos. There are no less than 20,000 stored on my latest laptop, and that’s just from the last three years.  Trying to find a particular picture is a nightmare unless I can remember the date I took it. Right.

The one good thing about digital photos though, is not having to pay to get them developed, but that’s the bad thing, too, because then I take more photos.  Once I design and print out a beautiful “coffee table photo book,” then what?  Why keep the hundreds of photos that didn’t make the cut? But deleting them just seems too cruel.  I worry someday my brain won’t remember all the trips we took or what my sweet boy looked like at five years old, so I keep them, thinking they will entertain me in my senior years.

Wait, my senior years are here!  Now is the time for purging and getting rid of things I’ve been collecting for decades.  And I’m not just taking about the bacteria on my floors.