Past writings & the dangers of Internet procrastination

Having grown weary of the chore of googling myself every time I want to find past writings, I’ve added to each page a list of links to past writings available online. It’s called "My writings elsewhere".

Here’s the current list, for those interested:

I’ve left out a few things, but it’s thought provoking and even a bit depressing to survey such a short list when you’ve contributed a gazillion posts to all sorts of mailing lists as much as I have over the last decade and a half.  (Unlike most of you whippersnapper new jacks  out in the Blogosphere, I was scrappin’ with people over Islam, politics,  and all sorts of other things, way back in the early 1990s when the World Wide Web was text-based and had yet to catch on outside techie circles. I still remember the excitement of downloading my first file–the Bhagavad Gita in plain text–via not the Web but rather the now extinct Gopher network. )

Sure, for many years my goal was simply to participate in an exciting new medium, a new "town hall meeting".  I often found the exchanges enjoyable and stimulating–and I even made
a good number of friends and useful contacts that I otherwise probably would
never have known–but I can’t help but groan, Man, I had a penny for every long, carefully thought-out post that
was painstakingly constructed and then hurled into the ether of the
Internet debate, never to be seen again….  It was a life style or hobby of sorts, and this was participation in the dawn of an exciting new dimension of modern life, but the uncomfortable question remains:  But what do I (or most other early Internet users) have to show for all those endless discussions and debates? 

Oh well. As someone once wrote, God loves the lazy rainbow no less than the laboring sea.

The scary thing to me is that Internet today is far more addictive.  It’s far easier (and tempting) today to fritter away one’s intellectual energy and spare time online.  Facebookers take note!