The OS is only using 1.11GB RAM [wired memory]. The rest is app memory. Chrome is a known memory hog, so try Safari instead, but that all looks pretty normal to me. Nothing at all to even bother about until that green bar on the left goes orange or red. It's barely used any swap either, which is quite surprising on an 8GB Mac.

BTW, learn & take to heart the modern adage "Empty memory is wasted memory." You want the OS to be as fast as possible. It does this by keeping things in RAM it thinks you may need again. This is a thousand times faster than fetching it from disk, even with modern solid state technology. If this cached RAM space is needed by another process, it will just drop it from memory to allow the new app to use it.

The OS is only using 1.11GB RAM [wired memory]. The rest is app memory. Chrome is a known memory hog, so try Safari instead, but that all looks pretty normal to me. Nothing at all to even bother about until that green bar on the left goes orange or red. It's barely used any swap either, which is quite surprising on an 8GB Mac.

BTW, learn & take to heart the modern adage "Empty memory is wasted memory." You want the OS to be as fast as possible. It does this by keeping things in RAM it thinks you may need again. This is a thousand times faster than fetching it from disk, even with modern solid state technology. If this cached RAM space is needed by another process, it will just drop it from memory to allow the new app to use it.

Of course, the reason a consumer-oriented desktop OS like macOS or Windows is bulkier than such as linux is the sheer quantity of 'user experience' features. If you really want an OS to be bare-bones, then you can sacrifice the 'ease' of use for a skinny stripped down version of nix that will do just as much… but won't help you out as a newbie. It will make you research every function, then type it in, in Terminal. Many modern nixes don't go all the way down to this, they also have some 'user comfort' added.