If you don't need it...

The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem is marvellous. Every day you can see how many sites have linked to your site and, therefore, where you stand in the Bear's grand scheme.

When Pratie Place was new and I discovered this "ecosystem," it amused me. I didn't at all mind being some squishy invertebrate or other at the bottom of the heap.

When my blog started to accumulate links, though, its ecosystem ranking started to prey on my mind a bit.

A few weeks ago, I had 121 links and that made me sort of happy. But since then, my linkage has eroded by half. I slipped out of the marsupial category and became a rodent again.

I'm not sure whether links "wear out" after a while and you need new ones, or whether half the people who at some point decided to link here now decided they don't like this place after all.

The point, though, is not link erosion. It is that the very existence of the ecosystem has caused this dismay. If the ecosystem weren't accessible, I wouldn't care about the links. I wouldn't know about them.

Initial fascination also tempted me into a permanent state of too-much-information at sitemeter.com, where you can find out, hour-by-hour if you like, how many people visit your blog. I find I visit sitemeter.com the way people check stock quotes: when things are going up, check all the time; when things are going down, stop checking and mope.

An obsession with "more" is as bad for an individual person as it is for our planet in general. As long as the business model (or personal goal) is "always more," we are doomed. So in this part of my life I'm working on being happy with "some."

I'm starting to want less of most everything. Information, for instance. I also don't need to know about every horrific crime committed in every time zone. Newscasts run all day and all night and there's always something going badly wrong someplace in the world. What does knowing this improve?

Technology, another example. The fact that something has been invented doesn't actually require us to have it or even want to have it. (Satisfying poster is from Grow A Brain.)

In the last couple years I've thought more and more about things it isn't better to have. Some of these:

• Leaf blowers. Loud, heavy, blow the leaves in one direction and then the other.
  
• New cars. Depreciate immediately, high insurance rate, tempting to carjackers and fate.
  
• Gew-gaws of any kind which cause people to go into debt.
  
• Large houses with empty rooms that must be heated and air-conditioned.
  
• Anything in storage.
  
• Rarely used kitchen appliances.

STUFF is getting on my nerves.

From an interview with Eric Brende:Physical exercise: Look at the car. Here's something we have to work many hours to pay for, maintain, fuel. Over a lifetime we spend more on our cars than on our houses. That money translates into work we have to do. Then we sit in this vehicle a couple of hours a day, and miss out on the exercise we would have gotten if we walked or biked. Then, on top of it all, we have to go to a gym, or jogging, to recover the exercise that we missed. Or else suffer terrible medical consequences. So if we'd simply done what came naturally in the first place? Used our bodies to do work and to travel?

Obviously, to be continued.

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