bombs in bottles
It's been about four months since I eliminated Amazon, Apple, Automattic, Cloudflare, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Twitter from my life. Doing so had some immediate effects, which I've written about in a bunch of past posts:
The first couple months were the most dramatic. But things continue to change. Two notes in particular:
When I started deleting my social media accounts, dropping Amazon, and changing my computer-ing habits, I didn't entirely know why I was doing it. I knew I needed a change. I knew that Big Tech had stopped being fun or useful for me years ago, yet I didn't understand how to get away from it. I knew that once I discovered alternatives, I was delighted to discover the Web I remembered from my teen years still existed.
Lately, however, I've been able to articulate the problem more clearly: social media and Big Tech in general had me perpetually dissatisfied.
Perpetual dissatisfaction is good for capitalism, of course. It keeps one scrolling or buying.
I knew I was done with social media forever the day I found myself doomscrolling Reddit and suddenly thought "I'd rather be scrubbing the bathtub." Bathtub grime is finite, and when I finished, I'd have a clean bathub.
I put down my phone. I scrubbed the bathtub. And then I deleted my Reddit account - the last of my social media accounts and the last perpetual-scrolling site I used. I haven't missed it for a second.
I spent the first two months of this year getting away from Big Tech. Now, I'm spending my time going toward things I find satisfying.
Most of them are very simple: Reading. Playing the piano. Gardening. Building a brooder and a coop in preparation for my chickens. Cooking. Cleaning. Building a website. I still participate in a few Web forums, and those are more satisfying than social media ever was.
"Finite" is a big part of satisfying. When I'm done reading new forum posts, I go do other things.
I had a recreational shopping habit for decades. Recreational shopping was the only hobby my mother and I shared - the only time as a kid that I felt like my mother was at all interested in me. So the emotional connection to it was intense. For a long time, I assumed it was insurmountable.
Part of the process of taking my life back from Big Tech has been cutting loose all my old online shopping accounts. Part of protecting my information online has been setting up a Privacy.com account to spin up masked card numbers when I do need to order something online.
Using Privacy.com presents just enough friction that I really have to intend to buy something online in order to get it done. It's enough friction to make me think about what I'm buying. Enough that I'm doing a lot more research into what I buy and from where.
I used to buy things online because it was "convenient." I told myself I "hated stores." With the amount of shopping I used to do, of course I did; I would have been in a store nearly every day.
I still don't love stores, mostly because I don't particularly enjoy driving or strangers. But I like them more now than I like online shopping. Only going to a store once every couple weeks at least makes the experience novel. Shopping online isn't even that. It's not even real stuff. It's just pictures of stuff.
I have ordered a couple things online recently, mostly because buying them locally wasn't an option or made no sense. (I really need to do a post on how much shopping research I've been doing lately and how dumb some of the results have been.) But it's really not my preferred option. I actually got sad when no pet store in town had the dog crate I wanted to buy for a brooder/hen hospital and I had to order it online instead.
Otherwise? I don't shop recreationally anymore. In fact, I avoid going to stores unless there's something I actually need. It's not satisfying.
I did not expect to get here. I never expected to break my shopping habit. I didn't even know that "satisfying" was what I was looking for when I decided to cut Oligarch Tech out of my life.
Now I'm curious where I'll be in another four months.
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