Turn Off and journal instead
This weekend I had quite a break through in my life. Not to go into details but it was from a traumatic moment in my young life. And the reason this happened is because I turned off my devices. Yes, as a tech nerd that gets distracted from shiny new things, like hardware or learning new software, I decided that's enough. I'm tired of dealing with the issues that surround the new Mac OS and iOS, tired of tinkering with my OpenBSD workstation, tired of reading Mastodon and RSS feeds, tired of all the distractions.
My mind is always busy during the day and night. Processing what happened during the day from all these things. What I thought was excitement or something to look forward to... was just another distraction. I opened the desk drawer where I've saved two notebooks and a pen that I got as work gifts, and decided today is the day. I'm going to start writing again on paper and screw researching what text editor is the best, what note taking organization software is the best, what operating system platform is the best for me, or how to export kindle scribe notebook f**king proprietary file formats. I'm done.
I opened one notebook and started writing my memories from that childhood moment. It came rushing out and I couldn't keep up my writing. I'm quicker typing than writing of course after decades of using a keyboard. But I adapted, my cursive writing slowly came back to me and I started writing faster and faster. I opened the other notebook and started journaling. Keeping things separate will make it easier for me to come back to my writings and thoughts.
Another thought came to me and perhaps terminal living is what I need and come to terms with. I've always been hesitant to live just a terminal / CLI life because my memory isn't as good to recall commands and may lose all my files by accident. But there is nothing stopping me from having a separate notebook and write down instructions for myself on how to do things. I find using window managers and other operating systems, is how easy to get distracted. We have shortcuts in so many places making it easy to click here and there and take us away on another task. Our smartphones are the same thing, all these colourful shortcuts to take us to different places. But living in a black terminal window, perhaps, it will make me actually think what the purpose is for turning on this computer. Not just open up a browser window and start surfing the internet to some awful place.
As much as I love my computers and devices, nothing beats the simplicity of paper and pen. I just feel overwhelmed by all this hardware most days now. Retro computing is nice but one day I will need to figure where to store everything. It might just be that I may need to not use my home office for actual day to day stuff and more of a space for when I'm in the right mood to deal with computing tasks.