Sunday, 29 January 2012
Happiness Takes (A Little) Magic
Brian Lam, on technology (news) addiction:
If you make content that is the intellectual equivalent of gummy bears, your site will appear to grow quickly. Advertisers reward size, and growing fast is expected in most places I’ve seen. Last month I visited Xeni Jardin, my blog-sister from Boing Boing and she said to me, “Only cancer and bullshit websites grow fast.”
And a personal favorite from the piece:
The first thing I did was to take back my time. I quit all the online content that was id-provoking and knee jerk. I stopped reading the stupid hyped up news stories that are press releases or rants about things that will get fixed in a week.
I can’t speak highly enough about this practice of hacking away at the unessential — I’ve spent the last year of my life canceling, deleting, removing, resetting, unsubscribing, and eliminating everything possible. It’s difficult and it’s draining. But it has been, and continues to be, the path to a better life.
