Yostivanich

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.