I love the unclutter.com website. They do a really neat thing which is to reflect on posts made a year ago. Here’s one that caught my eye:
http://unclutterer.com/2009/11/09/the-fictional-extreme-minimalist-future/
Which led me to read the fascinating comments which then led to Bill Barry’s blog:
http://18263dayslater.blogspot.com/2009/11/re-fictional-extreme-minimalist-future.html
This fellow makes some EXCELLENT points! When I was a lot younger, I kept things around for sentimental reasons. I kept collections, all of my toys and more.
When my grandmother’s house caught fire a few years ago, she was worried for all of my stuff that was in her attic. She knew my long history of what was important to me.. all those toys and memorabilia. These past couple of years I’ve come to realize that these objects are more hassle than worth. I’ve repeated the idea that a photo can do just as good as a job so much that it has become my thought process.
I still do keep things around… digitally. Last year I scanned boxes and boxes of old papers. Why? Because I didn’t want to part with them… my old thoughts and dreams… my old to do lists and plans… that is what I consider to be me.
I embrace the storytelling. I write and write and write my thoughts out. I record audio or video journals on occasion. These are the important things to me.
I’m glad for computing, otherwise I’d be like the professor in the play PROOF, with hundreds of notebooks filled with nonsense. There are many old to dos and ideas that I’ve shunned, or have lost interest in. There are many things I no longer tie myself to… but yet I still can’t part with them. I value most thoughts I have had, and even though after I die no one may sit and read it all, I always hope that some gem of an idea I had will make someone else’s life easier.
I like Bill’s comments on where our society is going and what is lost. Although people still LOVE taking photos and videos of themselves, we still do buy-buy-buy stuff to help us remember. [on an off topic, I once read an article about how the new thing is 25, 10 year reflections… for some reason we want to reflect on anniversaries… ALL THE TIME]
This got me thinking about making a segment for my kids show talking about sentimentality. I think stories and communicating with my friends and family is SUPER important, yet these moments, especially with my family, are in the distant past. I wonder what way I could showcase a ‘better’ way to communicate to one another. Email, Facebook and Twitter HAVE replaced letter writing. Yet, there’s some statistic out there about how kids create and abandon accounts with ease. I know this to be true because my little brother (14 yrs) created a ‘new’ facebook account and let the old one fall by the wayside. Does he no longer value his tech history? Or am I too attached to old stream-of-consciousness thoughts of ages past.
Fascinating stuff to think about.
I just moved all of my digital history into a locked disk image on my computer. That way, if my computer was ever lost they wouldn’t have access to all those old thoughts and experiences.
Oh, another side note. A few days ago John commented that he likes the two spaces after every period at the end of a sentence. For reasons of efficiency, I only use one space. Now, two spaces looks weird. See?
I also will sometimes use only two ellipsis.. when I’m separating thoughts. Three… seems a little long sometimes.
Okay, back to the topic-
So texting is the new form of communication and I still have old, old texts from past phones hanging out in that disk image.. well, at least the ones that didn’t get corrupted throughout the shuffling back and forth among drives. Plus my email account takes forever (more than 2 seconds) to search through because it goes back to 2004!
My digital life has become uber cluttered. I don’t feel like I have to sort it out now, but fortunately I can usually search for my ideas within a few minutes. However, my physical surroundings suffer because I don’t get rid of those things I truly don’t need anymore.
Next week sometime, I’ll continue purging old stuff. I’ve actually gotten rid of a LOT of things since my return from Spain, but now that I’m ramping up my stuff for production, another cleansing is needed.
Once I start making some money, I hope to purchase a really nice closet or something for all the costumes and such I’m accumulating. Those plastic bins aren’t doing it for me anymore. Every time I need something I end up throwing stuff on my floor. Then later I have to come back and put it all away. It gets old really quickly.