the time shortens between where we are and where we are going
For a long time now, I've had all my various bits of search history turned off. Every time I go to YouTube it nags me that my "experience" would be improved if I allowed it to collect data about everything I searched and watched.
I tend to use DuckDuckGo as my default browser, and I am that user who will go into the "cookie preferences" nag and reject all, dark patterns be damned.
There are downsides to this. For instance, I cannot retrace the digital steps that got me to placing that first order for embossing powder in November, but I remember thinking at the time that it would be useful to replace some of my ancient stamp and ink collection that I use, every couple of years, for a version of holiday cards. Along the way, while looking up whether the inks I used were still available (answer: nope, that company ceased to exist), I found out I'd been stamping all wrong this whole time.
I couldn't tell you what the video is that I first watched that introduced me to monotype printing via the medium of gel plates, but I can tell you that particular rabbit hole has me considering an in-person course in printmaking.
What I am realizing is that I am (once again, for the nth time) trying to spend more time offline than online. Once, during the period when I still cared to read essays by Paul Graham, I had a desktop background that included the phrase "create more than you consume."
Many years later, I don't think this is wrong, exactly. I still get the sentiment. But even I, someone who writes for a living and because I can't not, will never write more than I read. And I will listen to music and go to museums and watch movies and play video games and plan whole trips around food and . All those sensory experiences, all those inputs as the tech bloggers would say, are really about how I get to live.
So what I find myself embracing, these days, is living creatively. To quote a print by Hugh MacLeod that remains on my wall: "Do it for yourself."
Attribution
As usual you drive straight through the moment with the expected backing off of what was previously said. It is not only that confrontation is headache producing; it is also that you have a destination that doesn’t include acting like this moment isn’t inhabitable, hasn’t happened before, and the before isn’t part of the now as the night darkens and the time shortens between where we are and where we are going.
— from Citizen: “You are in the dark, in the car...” by Claudia Rankine