I am in the process of negotiating a bit of a lifestyle shift. If all goes swimmingly, over the next few months I should be going from a jobless undergraduate with crazy sleeping patterns and a total lack of focus, to a Married Man - which, in this instance, means someone with a) a job, b) a more focused approach when it comes to getting shit done, and c) a person to love and cherish and stuff and yeah and you get the idea.
While the latter is very nice (and if you want to help that happen, you can always shimmy on over here), the other two are important. The first, because at this point in my life it more or less facilitates everything else (including the third part), but also the second because for the first time in my life, apart from employment, I don’t have to do anything.
This deserves elaboration. I was a kid who always cared about getting his homework done. This didn’t mean that I always did it first - just that when I didn’t, it had a habit of hanging over me. As time went by, and study became more independent, the importance of the homework increased, to the point where I spent three years doing a degree that more or less relied on home study.
You might be seeing where this is going. Anyone who’s ever done an arts degree knows that the limits you set to your study are largely arbitrary. There is always more homework. I can say that I’ll read papers A, B and C today, but the fact that D, E, F all the way down to AAAAAZ remain unread gets me a little stressed out. It’s why I haven’t been writing as much, or at all, in recent months/years - there has always been the big scary spectre of More Homework hanging over me.
And yes, I know that some jobs can take over your life, and that the work of the self-employed is never done (I’m not looking to be self-employed), but let’s make it fairly simple - most jobs have discrete hours, that start and end, and their influence doesn’t bleed into your home. Which means no more homework.
That’s huge.
All of a sudden, I have this time that I can devote to anything. Even job hunting has its limits - there are only so many places you can call up, only so many jobs you can apply for. And that means actually taking stock of the so-called leisurely pursuits in my life and moulding them into something that I’d like to see.
I’m going to leave my new approach to writing for a future post - mainly because it’s still stewing over right now - but I’m more interested right now in reading. In part because, despite the strains of having other stuff to read, I’m already starting to read for pleasure again (I just finished Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins - gripping, exciting, wholly enjoyable and also awfully written), but I could do with refining my attitude and what I spend time on.
This brings me to the internet.
I already have a decent approach to Tumblr. I follow 128 blogs, but I make a point of mostly not following people (other than my fiancé) who post more than a couple of times per day (current followers: this is why I am not following you). I have a few friends through here that resist the urge to constantly post, and of course there are one or two exceptions to the rule, but I generally have the ability to sign on in the morning, spend five to ten minutes scrolling through my dashboard, and reach the point where I left off - usually the previous night. This is good. There isn’t the nagging feeling that there’s more - I’ve set a limit, and I stick to it by being extremely careful about the people I decide to follow.
The same couldn’t be said for RSS feeds. After reading Brett Kelly’s post about quitting RSS entirely, I had a think, and came to a few conclusions:
- I shouldn’t take a different approach to RSS than to Tumblr.
- I still have some things that I want to keep up with.
- I have a pretty nice way to do so.
I was following some feeds through Google Reader that churned out dozens of posts per day - Vanity Fair, Slate, Newsweek, Wired and a bunch more. If I left my feeds for more than a day, I’d come back to about 400 unread items and inevitably skim through them all. This sucks. There is a lot of good stuff on the internet, and I was subjecting myself to this constant feeling of not reading enough, even though I’m probably reading more than most.
At the same time, other stuff is suffering. I have a backlog on Instapaper of about 80 articles, and I want to read and enjoy them all. I also have a literal mountain of books to read whose intensity is (thankfully) squashed a little by the fact that they’re on a Kindle. Throw in the 200 or so unwatched movies that I own, the number of high-budget TV series that I own in their entirety but haven’t seen (The Sopranos, Rome, and seasons four and five of The Wire remain entirely untouched), and I have a pretty shitty attitude towards consuming media at the moment.
The only thing where (maybe) I’m doing OK in is playing games. I can spend a lot of time playing games, in part because I’ve spent a lot of my life culturally deprived of them (I only ever had a Game Boy Advance, and this - my first gaming laptop - only appeared last September). Nevertheless, I have about a hundred indie games I’ve never played, and the only games I can conceivably be said to have “completed” are Saints Row: The Third and the first Bioshock. Both excellent games, but there are plenty others that fell victim to a shitty attention span and the fact that my RSS items were mounting up in the background.
So I’ve pared a lot of stuff down. I currently now subscribe to exactly twenty feeds. Only one of these posts with the same frequency as before - the gaming blog Rock, Paper Shotgun. Four post once a month at the most. The rest are largely down to somewhere between once a day and once a week, and that’s comfortable.
I didn’t want to excise the rest from my life - n+1 has some excellent pieces, as do The Morning News and The AV Club - so for the first time in years, I’m actually going to websites and reading them. Browsing the internet, as it were, rather than desperately trying to consume all of it. This all sounds very silly and facile, but let me put it like this - for quite a while, besides Tumblr and Google Reader, I haven’t been engaging with the rest of the internet. Maybe once in a while I’ll click a link from one of those sites, but the enjoyment you can get out of browsing designs like this has been utterly lost on me.
I’m hoping this marks a better trend in terms of approaching reading. I don’t know if it’ll stick, or if it can’t be refined further, but I’m setting myself on the right path.