Simplicity

There’s no television in our shared family living areas any more. The imposing screen that once sat at the heart of the home, the altar of sofas and the focus of countless evenings, has been repurposed. It now lives in Matthew’s playroom, where it serves primarily as a large Xbox monitor. And you know what? I don’t miss it. Jocelyn and I just don’t seem to watch television these days. It’s not a moral stance or a lifestyle trend, it’s been more of a drift. A quiet migration away from passive consumption toward something else. ...

Once upon a desk, there was always a notebook. In the older photos of my computer setups that I shared recently, charting the rise and fall of my monitor empire, you can usually spot a notebook or journal somewhere on the desk. Often it was a trusty Pukka Pad. Occasionally, when I was in my more self-consciously pretentious moods, it was a Moleskine or Leuchtturm 1917. Between 2017 and 2023 it tended to be a Self Journal, as I had been lured by their science-backed system. These were always nearby, always half-full of scribbled goals, tasks, reflections, and random facts and figures about my day. ...

There was a time, not so very long ago, when I firmly believed that my productivity was directly proportional to the number of screens on my desk. One screen? You’re a civilian. Two? Getting serious. Three? Welcome to the big leagues. Four? Now we’re talking. Five? You, sir, are a professional. Possibly even a Bond villain. For much of my adult life – from 1997 to 2022 — I was on a one-man mission to surround myself with glass rectangles. I wanted dashboards, terminals, Slack, Outlook, scrolling logs, live bond market charts, rolling 24-hour news, and maybe even some code all visible at once, like a NASA flight director minus the buzzcut and the cigarette. I told myself that it was efficient. That more screens meant more throughput. That toggling amounted to waste. ...

I know, I know, you’ve heard all this before. Once again Ian is migrating his blog from one platform to another. And yes, it’s true that I have spent more of my life converting my blog posts between different platforms and markup languages than I ever have actually writing the damn blog posts in the first place. There’s a certain pleasing symmetry to it. I began my blogging life in the late 1990s with nothing more than some hand-rolled HTML, a text editor, and a dial-up connection. Over the years I have moved my content over to various platforms: .Text, Community Server, WordPress (twice!), GraffitiCMS, Ghost, and now I find myself almost back where I began. ...