Finding balance in the information age
A few years ago I discovered self hosted RSS readers (and RSS in general), and it has both improved and worsened my life drastically.
On one hand, I can curate my own news streams perfectly to my liking. On the other, I like knowing stuff, so I tend to stuff my feeds with way too much.
I have gone through ups and downs of adding more feeds, and after a few weeks or months trimming the fat to make it more manageable, after which readding them because there wasn’t a lot in my feed. It got so bad, I regularly spent most of my day reading my feeds and looking for new ones to add. (This also included longer form news from Youtube, which I forgot to mention)
The past few weeks I started reading physical magazines again to wind down in the evening, and I got a print newspaper for the weekends too. The magazines and newspaper have the same style and preference as me (it took a while of comparing and trying different things) so I still get a well curated info stream.
I don’t know why, but reading the same things in print is a much more enjoyable experience for me. The layouts and graphic design of some of them is simply so much nicer than a rss reader or sterilised webpages.
One of my goals this year is to learn to relax.
Minimising my digital info streams to the minimum while still being informed about my hobbies, and getting some of them offline, seems like a very good start.
Needless to say I like my curated feeds a lot, and will probably do a post listing it out in the future if anybody wants to take something for themselves.
But for now, I am in the last couple weeks of drilling down to the essentials.