I bought a flip phone - Defragmentation
Title says it all.
No more sim in the smartphone; my service has become considerably less consistent, but that's okay. The only real utility I had out of service was data, and from that stemmed unmoderated access to the internet, which isn't my thing, personally.
More importantly, little Pink always wanted a flip phone. A keitai, to be exact, because they weren't cheaply made flip phones. These weren't the average, plastic shelled effectively-an-IED-on-a-timer devices that happen to be the majority of the Western market these days; these were phones that were made with the intention to be used as phones (and nothing more). The simplicity of it is so beautiful; to have finally indulged my younger self in it and found that it was EXACTLY the device I wanted this whole time makes me a bit remorseful that I wasted as much time as I did with smart devices to begin with.
I never really liked them, funnily enough. There was absolutely zero appeal in them to me besides simply appreciating the progress made as the bits inside of them evolved to these now life-warping levels of utility.
To be clear, I'm not anti-smartphone, it's just not something I consider to be for me. If you like 'em and you can be healthy in your usage of them, go for it. For me? I've always been a decentralized kinda guy. On that note, even, I've been thinking of decentralizing my entire computer setup, which as of right now is an absolute nightmare.
Not only is it central to all functions not-mobile-but-still-technology, it's central AND requires two entirely distinct (and otherwise independently functioning) devices to be running at the same time. It just sucks. Want to check in with people online? Beware the gazillion temptations and attention-siphons that arise as a natural byproduct of initiating the programs needed to do that one (little) thing.
The result of this digitally centralized workspace is, as you may expect based on the rest of this post, an infinitely high wall of distraction to climb in order to do any one task.
I already struggle with starting tasks before all of this nonsense, so let's raise a little hell. Throw shit around, trash the place, take a good, long look at the mess I've created, and then decide what I want to do with it.
I came to this title by considering why I didn't want to go for something more common, i.e. "The Digital Detox". To be concise (my biggest weakness), it's not that I found myself addicted, but that I found myself encountering the human mental equivalent of computer disk fragmentation --- so many tasks at the same time that no one thought got enough attention to have a single, contiguous line of disk space (as it would be in this metaphor), so shit ends up all over the place in little bits and pieces. I end up having internal associations of things that make absolutely no sense. Sure, it's handy for word association games and the like, but consider the following example:
Input: Making a joke\
- Japanese word "Joudan" (meaning "a joke")\
- Joudan\
- Michael Jordan\
- Wahoo (variety of fish)\
- I used to be a fishmonger\
- Filleting salmon is relatively easy\
- Knife skills
Output: go cut potatoes
As much as I wish this were an exaggeration, it isn't. By the time I catch myself, it's already past making a joke, and I've likely forgotten what the joke was supposed to be, anyways.
Tragic.
Anyways, I'm done writing for now, I don't feel like putting any more funny dots on the screen.
Heippa, Netizen.
== Pink