Over the past year or so, I’ve been making an intentional effort to simplify things in my life. Not all of it has been successful, but as with most things in life, it’s a journey. There are ups and downs, but what matters is whether forward progress is being made to reach those goals.
A lot of the things that I’ve been trying to simplify revolve around the way that I use tech. The key thing to keep in mind with all of this though is that – just like with most things in life – it’s a marathon, not a sprint. None of these things will change overnight, nor would I recommend it. The best way in my experience to effect change on oneself is to dip your toes in slowly and gradually. Just like with any habit, it takes commitment and intentional action over an extended period of time to adjust. We’re creatures of habit after all.
A contradiction
And while saying that…. I’m also part hypocrite. One of the things that I am working on changing is using vim for more text editing and less bespoke code editors. I made a switch from VS Code to vscodium a few weeks back and figured I would instead take the plunge into learning the inner workings of vim more. Especially after reading this post by Simon Späti, it really inspired me to give it a whirl. I’ve used it for basic things and know of *some* commands (like, saving, moving the cursor, and most importantly, exiting vim).
To really get into the flow of it and force myself to learn it, I’m rewriting this entire website using vim exclusively. That might sound daunting to some but I’m enjoying the challenge and realizing that there are a LOT of cool features about vim.
Simple is good
As part of this website redesign, I’m also shifting away even further from some of the tools I was using previously. When I first wrote this website, I was using WordPress. There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just a lot. It’s never been simpler to start a WordPress website though, and it’s only getting easier. The issue I had was it’s not as straightforward to migrate to different sites, it requires a lot of features to be installed, and self-hosting it can be a little bit of a pain – not in a difficult kind of way but more of an “ugh I really don’t want to do this” kind of way.
So then I moved toward Hugo. Hugo is a Static Site Generator written in Go that allows you to write your content in Markdown and it converts everything into plain HTML and CSS, which can then be uploaded to any host in the world. This was cool to learn, and I really enjoyed working with it. I can’t place my finger on it, but I wanted something different.
In going with the theme of simplifying, I’m now in the process of rewriting the site (while still using vim exclusively) using just your basic HTML and some minimal CSS. I don’t plan on incorporating JavaScript at all (this is a fairly vanilla blog at the end of the day). You’ll even notice I’m not even minifying content – if you see something you like or want to see the inner workings of the pages in your browser, go ahead and right-click and hit View Source. I’ll wait.
But why do this
A big part of this is to be intentional with tech, like I’ve said before. Here lately, I’ve had a feeling that nothing about tech nowadays is good enough. It always has to advance something.
Data collection.
Money.
Squashing competitors.
There always has to be something more. Nothing can ever just be. I used to be all-in on the internet-connected everything. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. Then devices would go end-of-life and conveniently, the only way to restore that functionality would be to buy the new model.
The same can be seen with the yearly release and upgrade pushing that smartphone manufacturers do, at least as an example. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the annual release cycle per-se. The issue I take with it is the promotion of constantly trading in your old device to get a new one. I fell into this trap before. I’d see the new shiny, would want the new shiny, and would buy the new shiny and discard the old one. Especially with the advancements in hardware today, most year-to-year changes are minimal at best.
I also REALLY don’t like the constant push for more and more AI tech in my phones.
So to the why. Really, it just has to do with my general feeling of losing interest in tech. Getting back in touch with the physical world has been wonderful. I’ve been enjoying my walks outdoors more (at least, when it’s not a million degrees outside), I’ve been finding much more joy in reading physical books over my Kindle, and writing with a pen and paper has been wonderful, even for things as simple as jotting something down quickly in a meeting. I still use tech*, I’m just more intentional about it now.
* I stay away from using AI for the most part. Sure, it probably has its uses and I’ll probably get left behind eventually, but I have no qualms not using it.
You went and rambled again, Chris
Yeah I’m good at that. This turned out a little differently than I had in my head (and also compared to my first draft….. which was in vim….. which I lost lol). I’ve got a lot of work to do to really get things down to more simpler terms. I could write all sorts of posts (and probably will) chronically my journey on this. For example, I’m trying to get back on good terms with cooking (recent months has seen that failing but the attempt is what matters), and in doing so, getting to better foods and overall kitchen utensils that will better serve me in the long run. There’s a whole subject matter on this topic that I can get into, but I’ll save that for another time.