Used my document scanner some more (scanning tags and stickers people put on lamp posts is a cool thing to do).

While driving for a while today, I took note of how odd it is to be a person who is always ready to do smalltalk: thanks to the internet in general, and social media specifically, people can always have dozens of conversations with almost everyone else, kind of like a ready‑made dialog where whole topics can be discussed without having a thought of your own.

I don’t know about you, but reading the internet is usually such an overwhelming experience that I rarely had the chance to consider how overwhelming it actually is:

the experience of reading the internet does not create any memories.

And that is how I measure how much of an overwhelming experience something is – by how likely it leaves memories behind.

Dealing with that has become my personal goal, in a way. I want to create a much more simple life for me, and not being able to do smalltalk at all, well – that is just a nice start, I think.

Eventually, I want to further grow my own garden of my mind, until I always feel as if I am sitting in my tiny house in the Austrian Alps, instead of feeling like someone who uses his thumb to read the next screen height, at random, without end.

I think that is why I like reading books, while the internet eventually exhausts me and leaves me with nothing to show for it.

In the end, I can create a memory of what I read online by consciously willing it – but honestly, that seems like a waste in itself.

And if to remember feels like a waste, then the whole action becomes something worthy of reconsideration.

Source: My after‑hours blog on Tumblr Code & Canvas