I’m a control freak, and I have no idea how to fight this thing. At least now.
I know some tricks that help me, I control some things I can control, sometimes easily. That helps me feel better, especially amidst the stress.
E.g. I believe I have all my haircuts over the last decade noted down. If not all, then many. But that’s a very easy thing to track: I have calendar events, plus I have a tiny script that I trigger over ssh when the haircut is done. There’s no real value in that, but it helps me to feel better, very cheaply.
Yet, I think there are things one needs to not worry about losing control over. Also (slightly different topic), one needs to not worry about destroying something one is used to.
I don’t know if that’s related, but it feels so good when I let go of some things and have less. The less I have, the better I feel.
For some groups of things, I panic when I have very little. I have over five (close to ten, I guess) laptops. Only one is in a perfect working condition, it’s my most expensive MacBook Pro. The others are all broken, either partially (could be a nice home server), or completely. (I don’t know how to utilise them properly.)
And I’m really worried about having just one MacBook. What if it’s broken? I’m not willing to buy one more (yet I had two just recently, before the other one suddenly broke almost a year ago), because the 2nd one of no real use to me. When this MacBook breaks, I think I’m going to buy a ThinkPad, with hopes the business model would be as strong as this military-grade T430 that I has briefly. That may solve my issue with having less.
Same goes for my home servers. I prefer to have at least one (but better two, for redundancy) at the locations I control. For me those are three locations, excluding other countries. I may want to expand one day, but that’s another story.
I have two iPhones. And I’d have three, if I didn’t broke one with a tiny accident (heavy drop). Or six, if my mum won’t have three either. I use the most recent I have, obviously. But I still use the older one, daily.
In life, there are things I use, and for them I prefer to have at least two. If I like something, I’m buying two. Two T-shirts, if I like them. I have many shoes. And clothes. I like buying them. But I buy them en masse, because I don’t like buying them out of need. I like buying them out of pleasure. Causally, and having no real need in buying. That way I can choose only the ones I truly need. Or may need in a foreseeable future. That doesn’t work well always, sometimes I slip into the trap of liking something more than I probably should. I have a tremendous issue with shirts, it looks like I have a couple of hundreds already. Even if I stopped buying any new ones years ago.
I have two white shirts from British Next, and I love them more than any I had before. They are just perfect, I’d wish I had 100 of them. They both had tiny coffee stains near the left hand (don’t ask), and so I decommissioned them as ‘I don’t care what’ll happen with them,’ wearing them everywhere. I don’t remember when the stains were gone. I thought they won’t go at all, but they are long gone. They were washed too often, maybe. They’re in a bad shape now, yet they look perfect on me, so I keep wearing them. Just a couple of days ago, I thought probably I should let them go, but I just couldn’t. I think they’ll live over the winter. The irony here is that I have at least dozens of no worse shirts, and those look new (or are new), while these two yell ‘oh, I don’t have any more shirts to wear.’
I don’t know what to do about this. With physical things, ecology question bothers me very much.
With virtual things, it’s so much easier. In a virtual world, things can be stored infinitely. These days, storage devices are pretty cheap, and I have tens of HDDs, plus some 10s of SSDs (but those are inside all my laptops, computers). Summarily, at home, I have over 10 TBs of space, maybe mor.e. Yet, I have little issues with data, I’m not hoarding. I collect some things, but apart from my photos and videos (plus work-projects, obviously). nothing is of any value for me.
I don’t have a working system for keeping things clean (yet, I’m working on improving gym current system). But I clean things manually from time to time, and it feels very good. I don’t like collecting virtual dust. It’s ingrained in many of my processes. However, since I started blogging again, I plan to hoard all my tiny thoughts here and there, as I think there’s tremendous value in that. (For me only, obviously.)
It feels like I’m more a computer person than the real person. I am not too experienced with the real world, unfortunately. I’m slowly working on it, but it takes a tremendous energy either. Saying that, I guess readiness to let things go, does it represent the state of life being well architected?
It’s an open question. Maybe.a rhetorical one, but maybe not. A philosophical one, for sure.
I have no answer of my very own, but it feel it’s closer to letting things go rather than collecting them, this wisdom.