Earlier today I posted the (currently) second of my “upcoming 2027 resolutions” [though it should be understood that most will start essentially now]: getting back into solo-play and clearing out some long standing threads.
The first was to empty my old massive Kindle TBR pile.
Now there is a third and possibly a fourth, depending on how mentally dividing this up helps:
(3) greatly reduce the waste-scrolling in part by (4) rebuilding a schedule for myself.
When we first moved and I was adapting to a semi-retired sort of life, I was doing pretty well with projects. I had a routine where I would get up to help get B to school, then work out, then breakfast, etc. Budget ever so often. Working on the blogs but also coming up with interesting projects to do in my spare time.
Nothing set in stone. Just doing things by rough pattern.
I think I now need to set some stuff in stone. Something shifted early this year when I was having to deal with a lot of pain and also went through lifestyle changes and grief. A few weeks of off-kilter became a few months and now a lot of days I feel like I am losing a race without knowing the route or rules.
Some of that — though surely it is a symptom as much as a cause — is what I’m calling waste-scrolling. That time spent on the internet and just clicking one more video, refreshing one more page, or just generally getting up to do some task again and again but always stopping in the middle.
The kind of thing where I write a post like this and maybe stop a time or two to check out something else before finishing.
Thanks to a mountain of social media, fighting the algorithm, and all sorts of things we spend so much time in a liminal space between here and there. Some of it is addiction farming design but some of it is a simple sense of dislocation.
As we fall further and further from our own lives, there’s no precise map. It becomes easy to postpone another day.
To waste away another half hour.
I have to stop that.