you heard it here first folks, social media bad and phone bad and convenience bad. i'm not going to waste your time with why here, but there was a great indieweb carnival about friction that you can check out if you'd like to understand more about the general philosophy.
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as i've gotten further into my adult life, i've realized that a lot of a person's success with building and breaking habits comes with how they design their usage of tools. many people allow tools to be designed for them -- there's nothing wrong with that at all. my personal preference is to try to make everything around me fit me as a person, but also help mold me into the person i want to be. this will always be a battle i am fighting, but that isn't such a bad thing in my mind. i enjoy trying to work some aspect of design into every part of my life.
anyways, lemme get to my point: using your brain makes it better. my impetus for writing this post came about when i was using the terminal to update my walker page. i realized after i got into the folder that i didn't need to list the files in the folder, i just knew what was in there. back when i used finder or file explorer primarily, i would simply read the contents of a given folder, since that's the most convenient option of information retrieval in that application. i didn't have to remember, i could just read. it resulted in me having "file cleaning" days where i would sit for several hours and go through all the files in various folders in order to free up space on my drive. as i use the terminal for file management more, those days move further and further behind me.
in addition to my file management skills, i think designing frictionful methods of doing things has improved my content consumption as well.
i am a zoomer (im not even old enough to drink in the US). my content consumption was similar to that of my generational peers: scrolling some kind of social media, getting addicted to moving by thumb a certain way repeatedly for hours. i recognized that my habits were NOT healthy AT ALL. i wanted a way to take back my agency from The Algorithm™, so i started downloading youtube videos directly to my jellyfin server. now, when i want to watch something, i have to:
1. decide what to download (free of the algorithm. i only hear about videos from other people online or in person, which makes viewing the videos a lot more valuable)
2. download it (requires me to enter commands in my terminal and required me to set up a couple scripts)
3. rescan my jellyfin library (sounds hard but its a single button)
now that i do it this way, i have to make a concerted effort to watch a youtube video. it's had the byproduct of making youtube channels feel like i'm watching shows because there is an end to the content i can consume. my entire life, i've had the sum of all human facts and falsehoods in my pocket everywhere i go. i still do, but now i go down more useful rabbit holes. i haven't blocked youtube on any of my devices. in fact, i just watched some slop yesterday! the primary thing that's changed is that i use it differently now. i type youtube.com in my browser with knowledge of what i want to watch before i get on the site.
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in classic mike fashion, i want to call back to something i forgot to elaborate on earlier: channels feel like shows. because of this, unsurprisingly, i finally watch more shows. i'm watching INVINCIBLE right now and i'm LOVING it. when my desires and thoughts are in MY brain and not being fed to me by an algorithm that desires and thinks for me, i enjoy the content i consume more simply due to my own agency.
we call that a circle-back. my phone is in japanese (because i'm learning before i go in july), heavily desaturated, devoid of notifications, and full of genuinely productive apps.
the fact that it's in a (mostly) unreadable language makes it difficult to use and makes me want to pick it up less. though, if i do pick it up, i trick myself into practicing reading japanese. by simply having my phone, i am always improving in some aspect instead of being hindered.
though a useful aspect of my phone usage, it's not enough to completely keep me off of it. that's why my home screen is completely black and white, and the rest of everything on my phone is heavily desaturated (see below).
further than desaturation, i also don't have notifications for anything except my bank account and some 2FA apps. this ensures that i am not 100% reachable at all hours of the day, which gives me some privacy. it's very jarring whenever i'm doing something else then my phone pings or buzzes and rips me out of whatever i'm doing and MAKES me pay attention. i have control over where my attention is placed now. if i want to respond to texts, i physically open the app and respond to them. the only thing about doing this is that when i do spend time on my phone, i go through a routine of checking a couple apps, which i feel could be optimized with something like glance. i wonder if there's some sort of plugin that allows me to monitor everything i have at once so i look at my phone a single time then put it down.
unfortunately for me, this is an optimization problem to which i will cave so immediately.
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finally, i only keep productive or otherwise helpful apps on my phone. you'll notice on my home screen, i have 16 apps and 3 widgets.
that's the only screen on my homepage.
that's (mostly) all i use.
i have a couple other apps that i hardly access, like tailscale, finamp, nhl, etc. it's really just more technical stuff that i don't use all the time. by having only a handful of apps on my home screen, i access them more. i'm even contemplating just not having a browser on my phone since i'd rather be spending time on the internet using my computer anyways. the reason i'm contemplating it, though, is because of glance, which runs in a browser. ideally, i'd have an android (first time that's been said) on which i can create my own app that accesses a single webpage using electron or something. my job right now has me using dart/flutter which i don't hate like i do javascript (you have to cheer now because i said something based).
i kind of got off on a tangent there because i'm utterly insane, but my point is: as i use my brain more, i feel more agency in my decisions. this helps me feel more confident in who i am and what i do, frees up my time to blog (have you noticed i've been posting more lately?), work on whatever the hell i want, and do the things i enjoy that i wished i could do when i was in the clutches of the algorithm.
i hope you got a different perspective from reading this. if you didn't that's okay too. if you have something you'd like to say about it, feel free to leave a message on my guestbook or email me at micgmcd@proton.me. cya~