mardi gras detritus

I’ve always been someone who is insanely curious and a completely voracious consumer of information: news and books and blogs and memes and, well, everything. I have a lot of my identity wrapped up in being current and knowledgeable, being able to discuss a wide range of topics and having an opinion on everything.

Back in January I embarked on a two week news fast because reading the news was making me alternately depressed and ragey. To my extreme surprise I liked the results so much that I’ve kept it up and have barely opened a news site since. I’m not exaggerating when I say I was previously spending hours a day reading the news.

And then there was twitter, really doing not a lot for me at all despite checking it many, many times per day, so I cut down use to once a day, then once every couple of days and now I’ve deleted the app from my phone and tablet.

As tends to be the way with these things, this information overload is really zeitgeisty. Last weekend I stumbled across the infomagical project on the great note to self podcast which pretty much nailed what I was feeling.

And that led me to the earlier bored and brilliant project, which made the case for the creativity and big ideas that come from boredom – and to stop using the phone / device as a crutch. Which is of course exactly what I was doing.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still the same voracious information monster, it is just now I’m trying to be more intentional about what I’m consuming.

Who knew that not knowing everything could be quite restful and calming?