Anybody remember the time when technology was supposed to make our lives easier and stress free. Washing machines, dishwashers, RSS feeds, podcasts, and so many other technologies were added to make our lives easier, to simplify and aggregate information so we could quickly absorb it. We would have more free time, more time to relax more time to just enjoy what goes on in our lives rather than adding more things in our day to do. More and more I realize how much of a joke this is. I rather propose that instead it makes us desire and feel like it is much easier to try and add more things into our daily routine. I currently feel like I am always rushed in the amount of stuff that I have to do each and every day. I have to attend classes, I have to do homework, I have to read the news, sleep, eat, hang out with friends (far to little of this happens), read the news, read my tech news, clean out my email inbox, clean out my RSS Feeds, more and more stuff just seems to be added each day rather than it being easier it seems to get harder and harder.
I currently start out my day by waking up at 6:30 am, taking a shower, getting dressed, reading my news that comes via email (CNN, New York Times, and BBC), then going through some of the morning feeds, seeing what if anything interesting happened and heading out to class. Classes till about 3 interspersed with time off that consists of doing homework or working on something, then doing homework till 5 or so. Then I eat dinner come back to my room, go through the feeds again, takes another hour, up to around 6:30 give or take, then do more homework, till about 11 pm. At this point I write a blog entry, which takes anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and half, then work on more homework and go to sleep around 2 to 2:30 am. And you know what, I still feel like I want to do more, I want to be more productive. How much is the human supposed to comprehend in a day. This is the third week of classes and I missed two classes this morning due to falling asleep from sheer exhaustion, I spent the last two nights staying up the whole night. I need to find a method and fast to do all that I need to do and still have fun at some point, the weekends are bad, because you go out to a party, stay out till 4 in the morning or so, wake up at 8 to 10 am and then I have work at 2 pm. 4 hours or so out of the entire day in which to do homework and try to do something crazy like play a game or something.
I think I might start up a new rule of trying to eliminate more of the feeds or maybe only reading some of the feeds on the weekend, such as the science and philosophy ones, that while interesting are exactly something that I have to read every day and don’t pile up into astronomical numbers. The Digg feed is starting to get out of hand a hundred plus on Tuesday, it took me 15 minutes just to eliminate all the ones I didn’t want to read. I talk a lot about how I want science to develop a pill where I can stop sleeping, but instead what I really want is a way for myself to stop trying to read about everything and instead eliminate what I don’t really need to learn about all the time. Do I really need to know the latest and greatest in the field of quantum physics, probably not, but I am interested in it, so I read about it. The RSS feeds rather than making my news easier to gather, makes it harder to feel like I have time to actually read about anything, simply because there is now so much information that it is hard to eliminate what I do and don’t want to read about. Rather than reading just a couple of sites, instead I am reading from 20 or 30 sites a day and trying to process all this information in a matter of seconds and move on to the next topic and read it even faster to go onto the next and then the next….
It turns into a never ending spiral, a spiral that just adds to itself every time you read a new blog, you hit that RSS button and bamm another thing to check every day. Is it really worth your time? Part of the reason I ask this is because I do want to start dating again, yet I feel like I don’t have the time to make that kind of commitment that a girlfriend would require, so I want to put it off. Yet at the same time, I value having a relationship of that level with someone else, and there are defiantly girls that I am attracted to and would like to pursue a relationship with. What should I do, stop trying to date again, or instead cut more out and feel like I am not getting all that I can out of the wonder that is the Internet. Personally tonight and for the past several weeks that school has been in session I am leaning more and more to trying to woo myself off of so many sites and go back to what is truly important, my education and my relationships with the people that exist in this world.
Leave a Reply