I want to spend less time in front of computers. Less time, not no time. I like my comfortable computer job, I like my internet friends. But less, less.
Part of this initiative is my new mantra of Always Be Deleting. It’s probably not a bad mantra for a content strategy practice (my job), but I’m applying it to my personal experience of digital things. In every app, every service, in every little digital place, I’m looking and asking “What can I get rid of?”
If I open the Photos app, I find a photo to delete. If I get lost in scrolling Twitter, I unfollow someone. (Or block. Always Be Blocking, that’s another good one.) Emails are always getting deleted, yes, but I’m mashing that Report Spam and Unsubscribe button with abandon, now.
I’m deleting apps from my phone, files from archives, drafts from inboxes. Less less less. My instinct used to be to organize all of this stuff, to label and categorize and move and filter it, to put together smart rules and idealized folder structures and get to some sort of perfect Dewey Decimal System of my own digital life. And because I’m me, and because entropy, that was untenable, and so the system would rot and linger, and the books piled up on the carts, and I’d feel bad about it, and…why? I’m honestly not sure how much my life would change if there was some sort of Young Adult Fiction-esque apocalypse that wiped every digital thing from existence. I mean I’d probably regret not having my own songs better committed to memory. But most of it could just go poof and I’d approach tomorrow exactly the same way.
So now I’m not organizing. I’m destroying. I don’t want any of this shit, especially not STORED. Good lord I’m tired of storing things. I don’t want to dust my hiking boot collection, I want to hit the trails.
I know you’re thinking it, but I’m not going to say the M-word. This isn’t some sort of “I used to have one pair of white socks and one pair of block socks but I minimized to one pair of gray socks and now my chakras are better aligned” kind of thing. It’s more: drunkenly tossing bundles of old magazines out the upstairs window while shaking a fist at the sky and hollering “I’m not gonna live like this any more, damn it!”
Tossing the little stuff adds up. A little here, a little there, and suddenly you don’t even need that box anymore, now two boxes are gone and you don’t need the shelf that the boxes went on. The more little shit I can delete and disconnect the easier it is to let go of some slightly bigger stuff, files turns to apps turns to whole platforms or systems. Things I can finally unsubscribe from, attention-sucks I don’t have to visit anymore. Less, less, less. Always be deleting.