Input

I’ve been feeling muddled recently. This isn’t unusual; my head is often feeling full of too many thoughts I never get to process. These are ideas I want to explore, blog posts I’d like to write, craft projects I want to make, things I want to read, and skills I’d like to work on.

I’ve been trying to spend less time doom-scrolling on Reddit and Instagram recently, and instead read comics, articles in my new subscription to The London Review of Books, or blog posts. Less time on social feeds has definitely felt better for my brain. I think the quality of what I’m looking at has improved, but it’s still just too much stuff.

This last couple of weeks, by happenstance not design, I’ve found a convergence on themes in various different media I’ve been consuming – I Cheerfully Refuse, The Outer Worlds 2, rewatching Fallout, Empire with David Olusoga (excellent, btw), book 8 in The Expanse series, even YouTube videos about the “Sephora kids” (jfc that’s a bleak) and various articles in LRB on exploitation in different forms (I now know ‘scammer compounds’ are a thing and often those people are victims of human trafficking).

All this while I’ve had a half-baked intention to focus on Sci-fi Month (why am I drawn to science fiction?), and that’s allowed my thoughts to focus in a way I feel rarely happens.

It wasn’t planned, but this has set off a little lightbulb. I haven’t felt my brain work like this in a very long time, not since university – and undergrad at that. That was the last time in my life I had time dedicated to nothing but reading and study, and 2006-2009 when social media was still an unrecognisable, innocent-seeming version of Facebook. Doomscrolling wasn’t really in my life yet.

Then this weekend, I saw a post from Manu on digital diet, and this prompted me to take a look at my own RSS feeds for all the blogs and newsletters I follow. I’ve been aware for a while that it’s gotten out of control; I followed too much, and I never read most of it. So I decided to finally sort it out.

I exported an OPML backup of my feed, and since it’s basically XML, I knocked up some XSLT to transform it to a simple text list so I can keep a record in Obsidian. It turns out I had 161 feeds I was following, which was frankly ridiculous, so I set to checking through them all and removing all the ones I know I never read (and that isn’t because I don’t think they’re good or worthwhile, it is not what interests me at this point in time).

I got it down to 38, which is still a lot but a vast improvement! The ones I kept for my feed, I also recorded in a note, along with a sentence to explain to myself why I follow. I will clean this up and use it to update my blogroll page.

This process made me realise that many of the writers or bloggers I enjoyed were getting drowned out, and I was completely missing things from them. Already this morning, checking for updates was a more enjoyable and less stressful experience… And I’ve actually read things!

I use WordPress Reader/Jetpack app for all my feeds, and generally I like it because it makes it easier to connect with and comment on other WP blogs. However, I’m wondering if I should explore Inoreader again as my go-to app because that has more tools for being able to group feeds and how to display them, which I think could be helpful now I’ve got more clarity.