Saturday, December 17, 2016

Stripping down to less

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.


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