The first of the year started for Your Humble Narrator much like previous firsts of the year; extended periods of concentrated slacking off, a sudden but unexpected release from professional obligations, and a cloying ennui that carries over into the subsequent weeks. This year’s first was decidedly more on the downer side; I had stopped blogging, I was detached and standoffish at work, and the holidays, for all I tried to avoid, contemporize, or at least nontraditionalize, had still left a bad taste in my mind. But in the middle of all this muddle, I still managed to apply the only New Year’s resolution I ever adhere to; minimalization.
It makes a certain kind of sense to take a moment to clear out the extraneous crap we accumulate over a year’s time, but it’s not a practice I or my family have always been amenable to. See, we’re packrats by nature; for whatever reason we hang on to the most insignificant scraps of our personal history, most likely because of the memories, good or bad, that we associate with a particular item. An origami crane from Boom-Boom’s bridal shower, an especially smooth river stone from my hometown in Illinois, a Pikachu piñata from a long-lost birthday; all these have made some kind of psychic fingerprint on the mind that makes them difficult to get rid of. At the same time, they are static objects, they serve no purpose except as memory bookmarks, what little joy they exude is recycled and stale, and they can ultimately hold a person back from moving on in any given aspect of their life.
That’s been the intention at Monkworks for the past week or so, culling out the unnecessary and retaining the essential, a task that is obviously easier said than done. One of the challenges is breaking out of the cycle of thinking that because something has been in one’s possession for so long, it needs to stay regardless. Another, less taxing side of minimalization is examining non-physical objects, like what’s stored on a computer or other devices, as well as reorganizing how we consume information that comes to us through these machines and how much.
For example, this is what my current desktop configuration looks like:
I have over 70 applications on Proteus, but only use less than a dozen with any regularity. Some of the apps I recently removed from the Dock include Limewire, BitTorrent, Activity Monitor, and the Documents folder icon. Limewire and BitTorrent, while useful programs, are also like gateway drugs; using them led me to more readily accessible and faster resources online. Since Proteus is a first-generation iMac G5, she’s bordering on obsolete, and sometimes huffs and puffs when running particularly heavy applications or loading websites with a lot of geegaws. The Activity Monitor icon allowed me to see how much of her resources were being sucked on, but now I can do the same thing with MenuMeters, which is a lot smaller and fits into the status bar. And any document important enough for me to want to go back to again and again (like the template for my blogs or my CV) is going to be available in Proteus’ “Recent Items” menu.
This setup isn’t much different from the way I usually have it, or even from the way any filesystem I happen to use at work; desktop items and icons at a minimum, and as much of everything else, documents, images, etc., in as close to their proper places as possible. As far as filtering the information that I access via Proteus from the internet, that’s an ongoing project that is slightly out of control at the moment. In addition to online timesucks like Facebook and Twitter, there also exists the mixed blessing of Google Reader, which allows you to aggregate your news and site feeds into a single page. Mixed because while you don’t have to stray far to get your RDA of current events and topical happenings, slow accumulation of feed after feed can make wading through all the noise in search of a signal an all-day task. Just the feeds in my “Food” folder can easily overflow into over a thousand items if I don’t check it every day.
The challenge, as always, is to ask yourself what is essential to you, (information, possessions, etc.) and what, no matter how important it seems, you can live without.
It’s a work in progress, because even though the post-postmodern world has given us the tools to do so, we can’t read everything, we can’t watch everything, we can’t do everything.
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