Tab Addiction refers to the bad habit of having way too many browser tabs open at one time. It's possible to open a new tab and continue reading whatever node you were on. If there are multiple links then this means that one page leads to n other pages. Repeat this process and you have approximately n^2 tabs open. Eventually you'll hit the limits of E2 but not before your computer runs out of memory. This is even worse on the big sites like Youtube where there is a year of content uploaded every hour. The impulse to make tabs of videos for later viewing is irresistible. Tab addictions are bad because they waste computer memory which slows down the device and they encourage compulsive time wasting. You see an interesting link and the process repeats until your whole day is gone. You end up with ten perpetually unwatched video essays just mocking your indecision.

I am a tab addict. There, I typed it. I don't know how many tabs I have open but I'm willing to bet it's in the triple digits. I keep my computer from catching fire by killing my browser and bringing it back. The tabs are still there but they are just addresses which have to load again if I ever get back to them. Which I might. So, I should keep them around, right?

I've had an obsessive personality for as long as I have autobiographical memory. I form plans and I don't let them go even when it's apparent that they aren't worth following through on. I'm not unhappy about this because I think it's inextricably linked to more useful elements of my disposition but I will say that growing up it took time to understand that this was both common and a fairly benign expression of high openness. Ones own finitude in comparison to the vastness of all human knowledge and perspectives is a hell of a thing to swallow much less digest. Not that you can't do it and get a big part of that knowledge and perspectives as well. My point being that I don't like to let information go and sometimes that means I start looking for a tab and forget what I was looking for in the morass of old pages.

IRON NODER XVI: MORE STUBBORN-HARD THAN HAMMER'D IRON