Letting Go of What I Can’t Get To

Saturday, December 14, 2024

I’m talking here of my online life.

Over the years I have tried various Read Later services, in the process building up a veritable library of articles that I don’t have time to read right now and so will put aside, neatly categorized, ready to be read later. In time that list gets too long despite my best attempts at working through the articles, so I declare bankruptcy and delete everything or prune the articles, keeping those that I must have and to…read later.

So I move forward with my new, freshly tidied reading list, knowing that this time I will make my way through the list of interesting articles that I have set aside, as well as those that I will subsequently add to it.

I don’t.

Then the saviour comes along. A new Read Later app or service. I love the new look of this app. It is a fresh take on the world of saving articles to read later. Just this fresh UI convinces me (probably not for the first time) that this service alone will change my approach to saved articles. I know that I will catch up this time.

I don’t.

My other source of accumulating online material is my RSS Reader. Like my Read Later experience, I have tried many apps and services. They have all been very good, like the Read Later services, all offering different tools for managing the websites that I want to keep an eye on and enjoy reading. But again like keeping articles to read later, my RSS feeds soon accumulate a bundle of unread articles. I hold onto them just in case, because I know (read hope) that time will emerge to catch up and read what I have not got to yet.

It doesn’t.

Sooner or later I have to declare bankruptcy on my feeds and mark them all read. From there I watch as the backlog slowly builds yet again.

Aargh!

I’ve decided that enough is enough and I want to take another approach. I admire those who are able to work through lists of articles kept, but time has shown that I am not one of those people. I feel that a more drastic approach is called for. Seeing all those unread articles and feeds creates a lot of anxiety in me that I _ need_ to get to them while knowing full well that that won’t happen.

So I have decided that if all I am doing building up unread lists only to delete them and start again, that I will do away with said lists.

I have deleted all Read Later apps and services from my devices. With those services out of the way I am no longer building up lists of what I inevitably will not get to. I’m letting go of that fear of missing out, and just concentrating on what I can get through.

With regard to my RSS feeds, I am in the process of moving to Vincent Ritter’s Sublime Feed. Sublime Feed offers a different take on RSS feed readers. Instead of collecting posts as they come in, saving them and building up unread counts, with Sublime Feed I am presented with a snapshot in time. I can scroll back through those feeds that I missed, much like a social media time line, or I can just stick with what is in front of me now and let go of that which I missed yesterday because I was doing something else.

The Result?

I’m feeling a lot more relaxed with my online reading. I don’t worry about what I missed. Fear of missing out feels to me like a real, insidious fear, amplified by the online world and its ability to keep and accumulate. But I remember a time before computers and the web when the availability and consuming of information was by definition slower and more limited. I am grateful for the ease of access to that which interests me that we have these days, and I feel as though I need to throttle back on trying to hold on to it.

The truth is that I will never know or get to everything. The world carries on whether I am involved in it or not. So I am trying to train myself to be content with what I can get to. What I can read. All power to those who can consume more. I don’t need to keep up. For me, better to let that which I can’t get to just pass me by in the history of what was.