Un fluire di pensieri

The study found that blocking mobile internet access for two weeks had a positive impact on several aspects of psychological functioning. Participants in the Intervention group showed significant improvements in subjective well-being and mental health during the first two weeks when their internet was blocked. These improvements were observed as increases in positive emotions and life satisfaction, and decreases in symptoms of anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges. Similarly, when the Delayed Intervention group had their internet blocked in the second two weeks, they also experienced comparable improvements in well-being and mental health.

Regarding attention, both groups showed improvements in their ability to sustain attention, as measured by the objective gradCPT task, during their respective internet blocking periods. Participants also reported fewer attentional lapses and improved attentional awareness when mobile internet was restricted. Interestingly, for both well-being and mental health, the positive effects appeared to lessen somewhat after the internet block was removed, although well-being remained significantly higher than at the start of the study. However, for attentional awareness, the improvements seemed to persist even after mobile internet access was restored.

This is no surprise for me. Our mind was not made to be constantly stimulated with notifications, news, blog posts, videos, etc. We need to regain the capacity to be calm, to focus and to be bored. Leave the smartphone at home sometimes, use a dumb phone during weekends, try to disconnect when you can.

Want better focus and a happier mind? This simple smartphone change could be the answer

While consumer and computer tech today is more powerful than ever before—and in some ways far more convenient—some of the structural ways we used to interface with technology companies were arguably healthier in the past.

For example, which part of the Apple II was predatory? It promised productivity, education, and entertainment. You could program it yourself, repair or expand it without restriction. No subscriptions, no hardware DRM (though there was software copy protection), no tracking. No need for special tools to repair it either. In fact, Apple openly encouraged experimentation.

Further, what percentage of your income had to go towards annual software subscriptions on a 20th century Windows PC (like this Sony VAIO)? You bought an application and you owned an indefinite license to use it. If there was an upgrade, you bought that too. And if you liked an older version of the software, you could keep using it without having it vanish in an automatic update.”

Old technology was more boring but more straightforward and less user hostile. Enshittification is everywhere and I’m thinking to assemble an old PC with Windows XP to see how productive I can be.

The PC is Dead: It’s Time to Make Computing Personal Again

“When Hemingway was stuck, he didn’t sit around brooding. He went to the bar, watched people, listened.
When Dickens needed material, he walked the streets of London, soaking up the city.
They weren’t waiting for ideas to arrive. They were out collecting them.
If you want to write, stop trying to be clever and start being curious.
Smell the ink.
Get your hands dirty.
And most importantly—
Get out the door.”

Wake up and smell the ink.

In times of streaming and subscriptions for everything, I strongly suggest you to buy a physical copy of the things you love and / or save locally on a hard disk or other storage you own and you can access whenever you want.

CD, DVD and Bluray players are becoming less common so you should plan to buy one now that you can.

This doesn’t mean you should end all your subscriptions, there are advantages in having a Spotify algorithm suggest a new artist. But keep in mind that the music on Spotify could be different from the original album published 20 years ago, that the movie you love could disappear tomorrow from Netflix and the software you use could introduce features you don’t want. And so on.

Own the things, media and tools you love and enjoy them on your terms.

From the Wikipedia page about it:

Mono no aware (物の哀れ),^[a] lit. ’the pathos of things’, and also translated as ‘an empathy toward things’, or ‘a sensitivity to ephemera‘, is a Japanese idiom for the awareness of impermanence (無常, mujō), or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life.

Interessante articolo de Il Post sulla funzione del Predicatore della Casa Pontificia.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Annie Dillard

I’m crying…

A very delicate album, listen to it in a quite moment of the day.