I’ve realised I need a break from the digital world. Not a complete detachment—after all, avoiding the web entirely is nearly impossible—but I must recalibrate how I’m spending my time online. Since 2019, after moving on from Twitter, I haven’t really found my footing. Mastodon, while offering a different platform, often serves as a diversion from engaging with the world directly.
Hence, I’ve decided to step back for a while. This decision isn’t for attention or to make a statement; it’s more like setting a milestone for myself, a reminder of this moment in time. I’ve taken similar pauses before and likely will again. However, I rarely evaluate whether these breaks truly make a difference in my life.
Maybe the pressures of life are just becoming too overwhelming, and a short hiatus will rejuvenate me. Yet, at this moment, I can’t foresee a quick return. Instagram remains the only social platform I’m holding onto, despite my desire to leave it behind as well. I haven’t found a suitable alternative for sharing my photographs. With plans to capture more everyday moments using my GRiiix, perhaps my blog will become the primary outlet for these expressions.
This feels like a mid-life crisis, as I struggle to understand where I, a 40-year-old, fit into the online world. The answer seems to be “everywhere and nowhere.” The connections I made on Twitter in my late 20s haven’t been replicated elsewhere, despite my efforts on platforms like micro.blog and Mastodon. Currently, there’s a lot I’m unsure about. Yet, one thing remains clear: I will continue to write and share my thoughts on my blog, I hope you follow along.
Following my previous post, where I discussed how certain tasks seem too easy, it’s equally important to identify opportunities to simplify our lives for the better. When tackling any task, whether mundane or complex, the desire to complete it must surpass the energy required. This includes considering the task’s relevance and potential outcomes.
However, this might sound a bit redundant, so let’s revisit the two examples from my last post: getting out of bed to perform daily routines and responding to social media posts. Your motivation to leave the comfort of your bed can fluctuate significantly, influenced by various factors such as work obligations, caring for dependents, and maintaining personal routines. These motivations drive us to complete necessary daily tasks with minimal fuss.
Naturally, it’s more comfortable to stay in bed, but it’s also straightforward to get up and start your day. On an individual level, though the effort required is low and the motivation high, the significance of the outcomes in your life is profound. Neglecting daily responsibilities can lead to immediate and noticeable consequences.
Now, let’s consider responding to a social media post. As previously mentioned, this task is overly simple, allowing users to quickly tap a button and share their thoughts with minimal effort. I believe adding complexity to this process, such as requiring a more thoughtful response posted on one’s blog, could balance the effort with the desire to engage. While it might not eliminate all frivolous responses, it could significantly reduce them.
The primary motivation behind this post is my experience with blogging. I’ve made the process more complex than necessary. While Eleventy (11ty) suits my learning style and offers great flexibility, publishing content is not as straightforward as platforms like WordPress or micro.blog. This complexity reduces my posting frequency since I now require significant motivation to write and publish, leading to many potential posts remaining in Apple Notes.
It’s disappointing, but perhaps this added complexity is necessary.
The modern world is great. We live in a time that is the safest in known history. The healthcare available is phenomenal, and there is a plethora of technology available cheaply to make our lives easier. Yet, in many respects, I sometimes think that it’s almost too easy.
I am not saying I want to go back to times where I had to worry about ever returning from a walk in the countryside. However, there is something about the way that technology, and even at times the world, allows us to do things, or get away with not doing things. I could, if I chose to do so, stay here, sitting on my couch for days on end and barely move.
I can have food delivered, be entertained by watching pixels move around on the screen, and even pretend I’m socialising by texting some friends. With the internet at my fingertips, I could do any number of things, strap a screen to my face, and even convince myself I am outside, whenever I choose. I can exist here in a bubble, yet barely exist at all.
What do I have to complain about, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm? - Marcus Aurelius
I don’t, of course, because that’s not in my nature to do so. Some people would say I barely sit still, but my predilection for action doesn’t allow me to stay in my bubble for very long. That doesn’t mean I don’t succumb to the temptations of easiness. It’s easy to waste time scrolling through social media, easy to look up things instead of working them out, and far too easy to comment on other people’s experiences.
I have lost count of the times I have stopped short of replying to someone on social media. Or perhaps deleted the post a few moments after hitting send, because it’s just too easy to get involved. To know things about people living thousands of miles away, to take in the information they are sharing, and to make your own thoughts known. That’s the great thing about social media, the ability to share and debate, but I am of the opinion that it’s too easy to reply.
In the excellent book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari talks about gossip and storytelling being important for our human development. That might be the case, that my sassy replies are somehow a result of our human nature to survive - but they don’t do me nor others any good. It’s too easy for me to throw in my two cents and upset everyone, including myself. There is no friction between seeing a post and hitting reply, when some barriers would do us all good.
A little over two years ago, I first started experiencing weird happenings. I would grab my laptop, sit on the couch or at my desk ready to write a blog post, and a little while later, I would catch myself answering work emails or updating things on our website. Without realising it, I had stopped writing, if I even started at all, and had begun working full-on when I should have been switched off. At that time, I tried to split things up; it never worked, and I am back to feeling frustrated.
I have one computer for everything. At this point, it’s a 16" M3 MacBook Pro, provided by my company, and for work things, I wouldn’t have it any other way. My hybrid setup means I can work at home from my desk and monitor, I can take it with me to my office, or be just as happy working in a coffee shop. The issues only arise when I want to do some personal things, and my work things are always right in front of my face.
The internal debate on using an iPad for my ‘creative’ work was sparked last time by Josh Ginter, but if I am honest, I don’t want to open that can of worms again. I do have an 11" iPad that very rarely sees any use, and a few iPadOS updates later, it sits in exactly the same place it always has. However, I noted Matt Birchler missing his iPad a few days ago, and he has an important point to consider.
I think the iPad Pro might subconsciously give me unrealistic expectations for how much I need to get out of the iPad.
When you spend as much as a laptop on an iPad Pro with a keyboard and pencil like Apple tells you to, it gives you a lot of false expectations. As a user, you now have to justify all that expense by seeing a return, and the iPad just isn’t up to the job. I can do all the things I need to do with writing and photography on an iPad, but I have to spend my time hacking my way there. Which is fine until Apple breaks something, and I’m back to square one.
Which leads me on to my second point, really. In many ways, my iPhone is my ‘creative computer.’ I write a lot of my blog posts on it, nearly always edit photos on it, and Apple seems to take more care with the OS, so things rarely break. You may consider iPadOS and iOS one and the same; however, there have been many instances where the shortcuts my business relies on have broken on an iPad yet continue to work on iOS.
This feeling of relying on my phone doesn’t fill me with confidence. If you’ve read more than one of my posts, you will know I yearn for a smartphone-free life. Yet, I feel content in the fact that it fulfils an important role in my life—it costs about as much as an iPad Pro, so it should! This post didn’t start off as a way to justify my iPhone. I’ve tried to do that before, but more of an appreciation of the work it does for me. It’s easy to be down on using your smartphone, and you should be aware of it, but users aren’t always scrolling through social media. They just might be doing their work.