The Danger of an Examined Life

I was reading the May 28th issue of "The New Yorker" and there was an article about Gordon Bell. Let's just say that in the interest of software or self-indulgence and, I guess, his job as a researcher at Microsoft, Mr. Bell is recording almost everything in his life. Past and present...it's being scanned, photographed. He wears this camera around his neck that senses light changes and takes a picture.

Now, Socrates, I believe said “An unexamined life is not worth living." But really.

Bell's initial epiphany was that scanning and photographing would let him let go of paper and objects. But there is this ongoing question of saving this stuff in any form.

God knows (if he exists and is paying attention) that I've tried to record my life. Sometimes obsessively. In cyberspace I have, from time to time, posted journal entries every day which included my mood assessment, my exercise routine, what I ate and how I filled my time and, privately, filled many journals (especially making records of travels) and KBs of disk space recording what I have done. I've made databases of books and people. I've recorded all my spending for embarrassingly long periods of time. I've even scanned in scraps of paper with my doodles on them. When I'm not making a record of my life, I feel a little lost in it. But clearly it can go too far. And this article is a witness to that.

Knowing how much to try to record or for that matter remember of one's own life, is a crazy science.