Lost In Data

Hoarding used to be a simple thing;
Most things that were made lost their value,
through use, becoming unfit to pass on
as something honest, once and still useful,
as well as once being personal to someone.

The longer we kept things,
the fuller our homes got and the less
what we kept was of any worth.
The balance only tipped the other way
when the space became worth more
than what was occupying it.
But even that barely persuades us
to divest, and disinvest in old decisions.

Now we have laptops with vast levels of storage
in which we collect vast amounts of data
-far more than any brain could remember
and much too many man hours of processing.
We think this is life, and it is an improvement
on the past. But really we are only lost in data.