sotolf

A “new” thing that makes life harder for us

I've been feeling rather spent and burned out for a while, and I have found out one thing that has been zapping me of energy lately, it's things fighting for my attention, I was part of groups on discord, playing some games with “social” features, and having big lists of creators on youtube that I was following.

So the result of all of this is a phone that is constantly going “ding- ding” and even if you don't think of it, your mind gets automatically drawn towards it. So for a while I started trying to ignore the constant dings, and just look at it from time to time, but it just made things worse, without me noticing, really I got this strange annoyed itch in my head, I knew that something was there that I didn't check, and I felt kind of obligated to, which made me feel always a bit on edge.

So the first big culling started.

The first thing I did was getting rid of discord, not because I don't like it, I had a lot of nice communities that I was part of, but the “obligation” to spend time there, and how you kind of always have to keep spending time there to not get out of the conversation made me spend time that I didn't really want to spend there, just to keep “up to date” for the times that I did feel like it, this means it was more or less a constant recurring distraction that was making me feel miserable.

The second big distractor was twitter, yeah, I spent less time on there, and was more or less constantly out of the loop, but I felt that every time I contributed on there I got wildly differing responses, some times, getting people liking things a lot so that I had a constant flood of likes, or I irked someone and got a constant flood of ire and annoyed people, which made me just feel worse.

So, what with things that I keep using

So, I'm still using reddit, I am part of good communities there, and it's one place where I am contributing is usually ones where it doesn't matter if I go missing for a while. I don't get notifications every time someone likes something I post there, and also it being what it is, often it's easier to just not answer something, it's inherently more asynchronous than anything else. But I'm going through a culling phase to delete places where I'm not really spending time anymore, or that make me feel negatively, so that I get it down to something that feel less like a firehose.

I'm still using youtube, it's more or less most of my TV-watching time, but I've drastically reduced the channels I'm subscribing to, basically if I get notifications about something, and I feel that I didn't really want that one, I'm getting rid of notifications for those channels. Also anyone using the “going live” thing for premiers to get their videos giving me 3 notifications are getting axed.

My main source of entertainment is podcasts, and also here I'm working on being better at just not listening to things I'm not excited about, mostly because I have so many good shows in my feed, and it keeps growing, so If I'm getting over 30 new things in my feed thats downloaded and not listened to, it's time to cull through things.

I guess this is another part of minimalismish

So I guess this is another way that minimalism is winning out for me, not really full on this time, but minimising things that scream for attention really makes me feel better, just being able to sit down and read a book for over an hour without constantly being dragged toward my phone or PC is such a good feeling, and it makes me start wondering how I managed to get sucked into it. For sure I'm not doing it perfect yet, but for sure it's a lot better than what it was before, and can only get better :)