Cory Dransfeldt loving the fact that Social media’s broken:

Find your space and don’t feel obligated to participate in any of it.

Like Cory, I have my website (I check in on the social bits of micro.blog sometimes although I wish I could turn it off) I have too many books to read, and I have a nice place to sit and read them.

In spite of of all the really great people I have met online I just can’t be bothered with the discourse any more. There is very little point in me spreading my words anywhere outside my own website (and activitypub things attached) so I don’t bother.

I cant thank the ‘world’s dullest edge lord’ enough for breaking Twitter. For infecting the world with his horribleness in the pursuit of his self indulgent version of free speech. I am forever put off being online because social media is broken, and it’s the best thing for us all.

I have no BlueSky, No Threads, and I’ll have none of whatever else is cool these days. Just me. At Greg Morris do co dot UK, and that, my friends is awesome.

Ali Abdaal in the video How To Reset Your Dopamine:

nudging your balance away from instant gratification things that just let you experience joy and reward in the present moment more towards slower things that actually can help improve your life in the long term

Not only is the level of your exposure to instantly gratifying things ruining the rest of your life, when you choose to do it is more important than you think.

As I have already written about, doing hard things is so critical in your life that it can’t be understated. This is even more critical when you first wake and want to meet the rest of the day with the best approach. You don’t need to get up and run a marathon or smash the gym, but “earning your breakfast” will make a dramatic difference to your waistline and your mental clarity that you will kick yourself you don’t start it earlier in life.

For the last few months I have been waking, sorting my things out and going straight out to walk the dog. This arguably isn’t enough for most people, it’s such a small change that I think everyone can do it.

N.b. This video mentions the new trend of ‘rotting’ and I am now even more confused with the world than ever.

Federico Viticci in his iPad Mini review where he talks about it being a ‘third place’:

I’ve been thinking about the idea of a third place lately as it relates to the tech products we use and the different roles they aim to serve… The iPad Mini is the ideal third place device for things I would rather not do on my iPhone or iPad Pro.

Having completely missed all the iPad Mini reviews, I saw one in-store at the weekend and remembered it existed.

I was a fan of the iPad Mini (6) when it was launched and used it for quite some time. However, once the novelty wore off, I quickly returned to using my Pro Max iPhone because it accomplished most of the tasks I used the iPad Mini for, eliminating the need for an additional device. If I could hazard a guess, I think that’s where the mini version falls for most people.

It gives you something bigger and lighter than a phone for media consumption, yet isn’t big enough to get bogged down in all the things you might expect a regular tablet to do for you. Stuck in a strange purgatory that is both useful and not quite useful enough at the same time. With the solution usually being “I’ll just use my phone”.

On picking up the display device from its stand, I immediately remembered why it holds this special place. A really nice device that offers a lot but fails to deliver a large enough use case, but — as Federico expertly put above — perhaps that’s the point?

Getting Away From It All

I am constantly fed up with my work life bleeding into everything else I do. I’ve written about it affecting my enjoyment of using my MacBook outside of work, and the same thing happens with my phone. It’s littered with Teams and email apps that allow me to do things on the go, but also act to pull me back in out of work hours.

Same too with my iPad Pro. It is predominantly a work device. One used to draw and design, so it’s out of the question to begin to read and write on it in my spare time. There’s just too many things to distract me away, and we all know I lack the self-control to avoid them!

Don’t get me wrong, it’s absolutely crazy for me to spend £500 on an iPad to use for such small tasks as would to create a ’third place’ but I entirely understand the logic. For many people, this place is gaming, but mine is my Boox Palma. A device I am often equally ridiculed for buying as I would be with an iPad Mini. However, it gives me a place to catch up with the waiting queue of RSS feeds and my favourite thing of all to do, read books.

Any third place you choose is one of happiness and contentment, no work allowed!

Since my early days of being online, I have been fairly easily influenced into making a tech purchase. It only required a few people talking about a new phone, or a picture of a Pepsi can from Kurt Colbeck, to make me go out and buy a new Android phone. This was the days when phones were fun after all, and there was always a new one to lust after.

It wasn’t just phones, I could decide to move my blog after one post by Matt Birchler and numerous other things. These feeling exist today, and I would expect them to exist in some form or another in all of us. It’s a ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ psychological effect fueled by social comparison.

Even after that purchase, or often when I see a completing purchase online, I feel the need to justify it to myself and that often involves publishing something. A review of sorts. Or something titled “Why I did x”. Something along those lines made me feel better about what I did, and that’s more than a little sad.

These posts were not for anyone else, unless there are more people out there looking to justify their purchases, they were for me and my weird brain. Unfortunately, these feelings still exist today.

I have been moments away from typing out why I purchased AirPods Max over the weekend. Wanting to explain to people that I went to a shop and tried out loads of different options. Sony’s and Bose and even brands I had never heard of, yet chose the AirPods Max because they were the most comfortable and nicest looking. When, in fact, this post is pointless. It achieves nothing more than a long-winded way of shouting to the world “I’m smart, honest”.

Removing the fact that no-one cares about my peculiar purchasing decisions. I also do not need to justify these things to myself, nor anyone else. Sure, buying the AirPods Max in 2024 is a bit of a joke, so perhaps you get some enjoyment from me spending money on things you think are stupid. And in the end I got my post, trying to make myself feel better, so why even bother at all!

Chris Wilson writing about his happiness being an unprofessional blogger:

About 10 years ago, I wanted to be a professional blogger. Now I’m happy to be an unprofessional blogger. Well, most of the time at least.

I, too, tried this thing called making money on the internet. At the time it was usually referred to as becoming a writer because a ‘blogger’ was a somewhat pejorative term that writers looked down their nose at. Yet, in the circles I tried to push myself in to, we were all nothing more than bloggers.

This distain still exists in many corners of every day life. There are numerous books published each year by people that are ‘bloggers’ but by publishing a book they can now refer to themselves as a writer — but I digress.

Over the last 12 years of writing online, the most significant change has been the level of income being made. A couple of years in I could maintain a bang average blog, publish a few times a week and receive a couple of hundreds pounds in ad venue back again. More than enough to pay for hosting, invest in some tech to write a bout and have a little extra. If you had a good blog, or wrote for bigger websites, you could easily make a good wage.

As much as I hate online ads, they supported people to do the thing that they enjoyed as a profession — but that ability is now extremely rare. Bloggers are the ones that tell you this doesn’t matter. That they do it for themselves, not for the income. Writers, on the other hand, won’t bother if the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Being a blogger means that writing online, even when your posts are scruffy and error-prone, is something you do for the enjoyment of it, and that’s the best place to be.