I have had the most bizarre week. It’s been good because I’ve been kicking things out of my life. The thing about working from home is that sometimes you get this idea that you can work 24 hours a day. Especially with blogging.
I was at this point where I had all these TV shows I wanted to watch every day and all these blogs to post to and all these sources for posts and I was posting at 1 o’clock in the morning or later. Logically, I thought this would work. It turns out, I created so much stress for myself that I started waking up in the middle of the night with a headache. I was in a state of panic all the time because my list of things to do was so long.
Once I realized this, and realized my life was going to be horrible until I made some changes, I decided to change. I kicked most of my sources of information. I went from four news programs a day, to one, and only if I feel like it. The thing about news is that it’s very repetitive and manipulative. Instead of just telling you stuff, they draw it out and give you 90% of the story over and over until they’re ready to give you that final 10%. Keith Olbermann mentions each story like 5 times before he finally gets to it and then just basically says what he already said. This is a waste of time.
The Colbert Report and The Daily Show are horrible sources of news. You can tell they have a hard time because they both want to cover the same stories, but they also know if they do, users will chose one show instead of watching both. They’re good for beginners, but most of the time is spent on stuff I don’t need to know. As far as humor goes, this whole genre of humor has started to jump the shark.
I also dropped almost all of my RSS feeds. I basically dropped anything that feels like a burden to read. While I think RSS does have a future, I see now how it doesn’t work. It’s a lot like twitter. You sign up for everything and then realize that you don’t have time to read most of it, so you don’t read any of it. This is a problem that the internet will soon start facing. All these services based on the premise of getting as many (friends, feeds, whatever) you can are going to start experiencing mass user overload.
In life, we have to chose, and we don’t get to chose very much. It’s like going to the ice cream parlor. There are a lot of flavors to choose from, and you have to choose one and at most two. Some people are crazy and choose three, but those people aren’t better off for it.