I am an avid google reader user, as are many people I know.  When I first started using it, I was adding a new feed every few days, but I started realizing that once I added a feed, I felt obligated to read everything.  With a couple dozen feeds, some with multiple posts a day such as Treehugger, it's a losing battle.  I generally have somewhere between 200-1000 unread posts at any given time.  In fact, I use my unread posts count as sort of a barometer of how busy I've been lately.  Weekends are nice because few sites update, and I usually have time to whittle things down a bit, but I rarely get down to zero.  When I do, I wind up in a mental state that I can only describe as hyperinformed, since I've usually crammed hundreds of bits of info from some amalgamation of tech news, pop culture, and sports over the a short period

I've discovered that this secret hope, that I can stay on top of every feed, has made me reluctant to add new feeds, and that's my google reader dilemma.  I ask myself, is the information I'm getting enough to justify the additional feeling of inadequacy I get when I look at a high unread post count?  It's silly, because I should use the magic "mark all as read" button to make it all go away, but that somehow feels like cheating.  Instead, I think Google should add a "don't show me any posts older than X days" feature, since then I could at least cap feeds that tend to have news that "ages out of usefulness" like Techmeme.  When I can read it everyday, it's great, but three day old tech news is usually pretty stale.  

Do others out there suffer from this same problem?   Are you reluctant to add new feeds because you want to stay on top of everything?  How many feeds can one person reasonably be expected to stay on top of anyway?