The Troubles With Keeping Up
Posted on May 2, 2006
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I’ve been pondering this topic the last couple days as I found my brief vacation from being online rather refreshing. Yet I also felt so out of touch with the online world while offline. And realizing that I had that feeling introduced new feelings of… sadness? Apathy? Not sure how to word it, but not necessarily a good thing.
Yesterday, 43 Folders had post about “keeping up“. And as usual, I think he nailed it.
I’m intrigued by this whole idea of “keeping up” — especially in how we experience and exert an invisible pressure to know more (and sooner) than our peers and the world in general.
[...] at a point you really need to ask yourself precisely what it is you’re keeping up with.
Interesting yet short article. He writes well and hits the high points though. Enough to be thought-provoking.
Remember a week or so ago when I said I had switched back to Bloglines as my feed reader? One of the first things I just had to do, after the switch, was uninstall the Firefox plugin that alerted me when new articles were there to be read. I just couldn’t handle it anymore. It was sitting there tormenting me all day long. First I tried telling it to only check every hour. But soon I’d find myself stealing sidelong glances at it. Just hoping that maybe it would suddenly alert me to the fact that a “productivity break” needed to happen. Argh!!! The Firefox gmail plugin was next to fall. Again, the damned things start to exert a weird sort of pressure and interrupt my work. Not good.
Now I’m reviewing my podcast and rss feed subscriptions. Surely some of those can go. Right? I won’t become a technical dinosaur overnight. Right? The other geeks won’t mock me — right?
Tags: lifehack
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There’s some sort of weird internet meme thing happening where actually backing away slowly from our connectivity might be something that’s catching on as the days lengthen and warm up and the outside world becomes more appealing…
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/offline-fasts-for-clarity.html
…it becomes easy to forget that all things digital have an OFF setting, and that occasionally, it might be useful to exercise that option.