The World is Not Enough

Megan McArdle wonders "how much music is enough?"

There are a couple of ways to answer this. First, and most obvious, is "all of them." Having every album at your finger tips ought to be enough, right? Seems self-evident. Maybe it is. More in a moment.

Second, I think you could say that enough is having every album you know you want. It would be a complete collection of all the songs you are conscious of being interested.

To expand that a little, you could also say it's every album you could possibly want. So, I know that I don't like country or dirty South rap, but within the general spheres of music that sometimes have an interest in (all sorts of rock, independent hip hop, jazz, some orchestral music, experimental and electronic music), having every possible album, updated on a rolling basis, might be enough.

Finally, I think you could make the case that it's not possible to have enough, that enough is only achieved when you're completely satisfied with your musical options at any given point--which, at least for a picky, anxious listener like me, is borderline impossible. I have more than 10,000 songs on my harddrive, and I more or less meet the second criteria--having every album I know I want--but I'm still often dissatisfied with my choices. And that's why I'm a restless devourer of new music and music reviews, why it's not abnormal for me to go through more than a dozen new albums in a month, and why I'm pretty much constantly searching for great new music. There's no such thing as enough; there's only temporary satisfaction.

Most of what I wrote here, I should note, holds true with any number of things: movies, books, TV shows, blog posts, magazine and newspaper articles. In the internet age, when content seems to bubble up from the pores of every surface around us, it's easy to become addicted to everything new, to feed on the slough of new content being piped into your cable modem. The cheapness and abundance of it all encourages us to devour more of it more quickly, to be satisfied for shorter and shorter periods, for enough to get, not closer, but further away as we have more.