digital minimalism and death machines

my workplace won't let me die. i've experienced four waves of layoffs in the one year and ten months i've been here now, and i haven't been laid off a single time. my coworkers (or i guess former coworkers now) were so happy to leave and finally be able to focus on their creative side projects without distraction now. i wonder what that's like.

in an act of "miraculous" timing, the resourcing team found an internal opening for a video editor, and decided that, of all the people on my team (including those who have decades of experience on me), i was the one to be spared to continue employment at this sinking ship of a company. i have given up on job hunting for a way out of this industry and am convinced that i am sadistically destined to witness the slow, agonizing death of this marketing agency to its very end.

in other news, i've been continuing to make more migrations to FOSS (or at the very least, not as unethical) uses, but it's been proving difficult finding the right ones for my specific needs. i recently made the switch from notion to obsidian, which in hindsight would've went fine if i had just known that obsidian was not designed to be for task management right off the bat. right now, i don't feel as inclined to deep dive into hour-long youtube tutorials that are like 85% humblebragging and 15% generally useful info that could've been taken from more efficient documentation, so i'm probably using obsidian in ways that are counterintuitive. oh well.

i'm also looking for a proper alternative to spotify, though that has proven to be more challenging. i've been trying to figure out the right setup for my music listening habits since last year, but the recent news about spotify's CEO and his obsession with funding death machines has encouraged me to expedite the search a little. the fact that my friends and i are all on a family plan complicates things just a tad bit, but hopefully i'll have something by the end of this year.

i can't decide whether i want to continue using streaming services like tidal or qobuz or if i want to go full physical and just start collecting various MP3s, CDs, and tapes. i already have a small collection from artists i follow on bandcamp anyways. my hairdresser, a musician for three emo bands on the side, recommended NTS radio (a global, community-run radio that's free and ad-less) and the hiby r1 (a multifunctional digital audio player) as alternatives to spotify. this both helped and complicated my decision fatigue. at the very least, NTS radio has been easily getting my fix in for curated playlists that expand my music taste. their selections for asian shoegaze, dream pop, and the like are absolutely lovely.

i worry that my efforts to disconnect myself from big tech is yet another ill-guided digital minimalism phase that i'm entering—an echo of when my neoliberal, GTD-obsessed ex gifted me digital minimalism by cal newport for my 18th birthday. after reading it, i got sucked into the late 2010s era of productivity minimalism (championed by business coach and author of essentialism, greg mckeowns) and careened into a rabbit hole of minimalist life coach youtube, where the stated goal of minimalism was to purge your life of all material posessions to make room for what's truly important: hustling and grinding. i think i only got so obsessed with minimalism per these dual-income white people's advice because i had a penchant for being unnecessarily contrarian as a teen, and minimalist culture back then screamed intellectual moral elitism.

after dumping my ex in 2020, i trashed newport's book with anticapitalist spite and rated it like two stars on storygraph. i remember saying it perpetuated a "quasi-monastic tech bro lifestyle." i think i wanted to scorn anything my ex tried to shill to me and so immediately divorced myself from my draconian approach to minimalism. i'm better now and am no longer applying surface-level heuristics to issues that hold great moral nuance to me. as far as i can tell, my ex is probably still moderating r/neoliberal and convincing people that california has a romeo and juliet law.

as of now, i can recognize that newport's book made one or two good points on the parasitic nature of social media and how digital devices are specifically designed to hold your attention hostage. but that's it. frankly, you can arrive at these conclusions organically with any amount of critical thinking. his takeaways on "digital detoxing" and substituting devices with a productivity-based lifestyle being the ways to reclaim individual value are so fucking insufferable. because of course the only way to justify having newly freed time and energy is to immediately pour it into time blocking calendars and monitoring wall street tickers.

newport obviously doesn't once mention capitalism or the profit-driven motives of big tech behind their soul-sucking hells of screen addiction. honestly, he does quite the opposite, and the two thirds of the book where he talks endlessly about productive essentialism would get eaten up by the same tech bros who think that hyperconsumerism is the folly of those impoverished and that poverty is the folly of those with poor personal finance.

needless to say, i'm trying to be much more conscious of the motivations behind my tech substitutions and abstinence. i think my frequent proximity to tech and tech bros by designation as god's least favorite communist has made me afraid to take just anyone's advice on simplifying my uses. it's difficult to balance "ethical consumption" with convenience, and i'm reminding myself that there's less merit in pursuing an ultimate all-or-nothing solution to something so deeply embedded into our lives. i'm just glad i'm figuring this out without the disgusting presence of silicon valley behind my back.