If you are like my friend, mired in sin and hoping to stay that way, continue on as you have been. If, like me, you aim for a higher plane in life, stop your wasteful, sin-dominated submission to the forces of greed, marketing and knowledge lust, turn away from your pointless buying and acquiring and use what you have. That's what I plan to do, anyhow. I am still making the plan but I plan to try something doable and not overdo it. I find the best way to succeed is to make a good plan, check it for genuine progress and for a goal I can actually do.
I have more than 2000 books in my Kindle. I don't think I can manage to not buy anything at all until I have all 2000+ read. I like my daughter's rule: give a book 50 pages before rejecting it if it is boring or silly or repetitious or any other way poor.
I have made a start. For maybe 6 months or a year, I have held myself to 1000 email in my inbox. I have kept my eye on the total and when it reaches 2000, I delete the oldest ones until I am back to 1000. I noticed recently that things have slowly shifted from communication among friends to ads and offers and background info like the Wharton finance newsletter and several from the Brookings Institute. I respect the writers and experts but I don't need to read them regularly or even get all the stuff they churn out.
I have thought for a long time that Amazon is almost to the point of being silly in the way they make offers and "notifications" of additional and alternative books and items I could pay them for. It is possible to be a collector of empty mustard containers and to just get in the habit of acquiring them. Like a miser, I could proudly count and re-count my mustard containers, aiming to have the largest mustard container collection in town, no, in this state, no, in the entire world. I have thought with pride that I may have an already surprisingly large ebook collection. More than 99% of them come from Amazon. So, I am not going to open emails from Amazon for a while.
I noticed a couple of weeks ago, while cutting back my inbox, that maybe 80 to 90% of my email is ads and info and offers and such from organizations. I have been using Gmail's intelligent feature to say that messages from individual people are important but everything else is not. I can use the important feature and the starred message and unstarred to quickly label what I don't want as "unstarred" and delete all of that stuff. Just choking off the supply and suggestion pipeline will change things.
