I Didn’t Know About Last Week’s Apple Event And Ignorance Is Sweet Sweet Bliss
Apple held an event last week to introduce their newest kitchen gadget, and I didn’t know it was happening.
That probably doesn’t sound like the massive, impressive personal growth step to you that it is to me, but trust me when I say that this is bigger than the time I curbed my ritualistic public masturbation habit.
Okay, so I was never really a public self-rubber, but I had my own area of personal shame: reading tech news.
I used to read so much tech news. I would read the news every day. And then I would stay up for hours past midnight watching tech YouTube videos. I couldn’t get enough of people talking about shiny new things! Especially hardware. New laptops, phones, fitness trackers, edible wearables, you name it. I couldn’t stop reading about them.
I told myself it was okay because I work in tech, sorta. And these tools are my livelihood, sorta. And that checking tech blogs every moment that there wasn’t something else taking my attention was okay because at least I wasn’t dwelling on the ever-lingering existential dread that hangs over my head like a fly circles over the only turd in the field.
Anyway, there was a pattern. I’d check Google News. I’d check The Verge. I’d check MacRumours. I’d check Twitter. I’d take a break to check PornHub. Then when my pants were back on, I’d check YouTube’s recently uploaded section. I’d do it in the morning. And then again in the evening. Or whenever I was waiting somewhere. I’d read the news while I was sitting on the toilet, while I was in the Metro, or while accidentally doing what I should have been doing on the toilet in the Metro.
(Hmm, this post is developing a running theme of the inappropriate public release of personal fluids. I promise they’re just jokes, officer.)
I don’t know the exact date, but it was about two months ago, just as winter was ending and spring was almost here and I was once again staying up too late watching YouTube videos about laptops I’ll never buy, when it just clicked.
I was done.
Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy following along with tech news and that’s not a bad thing by any means. But. BUT. But. There just isn’t that much interesting tech news. When a cool new thing comes out, there are enough people talking about it in the periphery that I’ll find out before too long anyway.
I, on the other hand, had been checking for news constantly and rarely was there anything interesting.
It had turned from a keen interest into a shitty habit.
I think we all have these moments from time to time, when we realize our habits have gotten way out of control. Like checking Instagram when you’ve already seen all the grams, except for maybe one new gram, and that gram is just an ad for something you already have. Or maybe it’s when you see your Screen Time report and get a slap of reality.
I’m not sure what switch flipped in my brain that night, but I was done.
I turned off the TV and told myself ‘enough’. It was cold turkey time.
Now, literal cold turkey is quite tasty. Slap some cold turkey and leftover cranberry sauce and dressing on some bread and you’ve got a sandwich worth killing over.
The metaphoric cold turkey of quitting something, on the other hand, is not so delicious. In fact, it tastes … fowl.
Unfortunately, I am no superman and these habits would be hard to kill.
So to replace the habit of browsing these sites, I used a browser extension to redirect them all to other sites. One went here to Medium instead. Another went to a blank Google Docs document. YouTube’s homepage redirects to my subscriptions so I can only watch the channels I’ve subscribed to and don’t get sucked in to the algorithmic black-hole of similar content.
My habit change is a couple of months old now, and it’s still working. I know! I’m just as surprised as you. Usually my bad habits linger over me like a fly over the only turd…oh wait, I already used that metaphor.
Well, now, instead of reading tech news when I don’t know what else to do, I sit in a chair and do nothing. I let the nothingness happen for a while until I decide on something else to do like clean the kitchen, play a game, write some nonsense like this, murder a bunch of crows, and then I go do that.
It’s simple and it works.
The internet is a great friend to all of us, but it’s also needy and toxic if you don’t set your boundaries. And saying no to such a good friend can be tough. But if we don’t say no, it’ll walk all over us. I’ve still got boot marks covering my face.
As for the Apple Event, I heard about it afterwards from my brother, and I sought out the news about all the new thingies they announced. But it felt different — better — to go looking for information about a specific thing, get all the info, and walk away. The internet is so good at that! It nails the ‘What was that actor in, again?’ use-case.
So to summarize:
- Good — “Hey Internet, what time does the grocery store close?”
- Bad — “Hey Internet, I’m feeling a tinge of existential ennui, show me hordes of opinions about topics that are only tangentially related to my true interests!”
Now to get all companies to stop exploiting the latter for profit, he says, optimizing his post for visibility on Medium.
