While this blog was silent, my life was buzzing with activity. I have been trying to tend to multiple big projects at work and in my personal life, like a juggler trying not to drop anything.
Not everything went as planned. The blog got sidelined, personal projects lost momentum, and a couple of them are temporarily frozen. On the other hand, I managed to finish a big migration at work. As always, Murphy learned what we were doing and motivated us to finish faster by intervening at the most convenient time with maximum effect (at least from his perspective). A big pile of important things got handled in my personal and work life, keeping me busy or at the edge, or both.
Personally, I managed to get my digital garden to grow, write more Go, and love it in the process. I decluttered my life further in digital and physical realms. Decluttering things take a long time when you're trying to handle decades of clutter collected by a past me who didn't understand the consequences of what he's doing. On the other hand, we didn't have these organizational superpowers back in the day, and I didn't know better, to be honest.
This decluttering process is not limited to my collected cruft. I'm simplifying my digital life and the places I frequent. I'm not using X (formerly Twitter) and not adding new photos to my Instagram account anymore (since I don't want to provide AI training material to Meta, a subject worthy of its separate blog post). Instead, I moved to Mastodon and will use another service to share my photography. Recently, I subscribed to a high-quality local newspaper's digital edition.
These moves are a new iteration of the trend I started by switching to Kagi in 2023 (which again needs a separate blog post), which profoundly affected my daily life. Using a user-centric search engine without ads has an immediate and measurable effect on life quality since you don't mentally filter ads and other SEO spam with every search, which is mentally draining.
I felt the same after subscribing to the local newspaper. Higher editorial quality, almost no ads, and access to the paper's print version in PDF form made a profound difference in how I consumed the news and felt afterward (i.e., not mentally exhausted).
The movement from popular, mainstream sites to well-selected, smaller, yet higher-quality environments made me realize how advertisements, feed algorithms, and optimizations for eyes drain our willpower, energy, and capacity to focus and do meaningful work. It's the same with useless discussions with people one doesn't know and doesn't want to agree on anything.
From now on, I'll be much more selective about where I frequent, who I engage with, and how I spend my mental energy and focus. I'll build a quieter place because I want to be tired for more meaningful reasons when I go to bed.
Until next time,
Be kind.