You can read this post on substack
So, I have had this account for A WHILE now. Like a long time— I got it when Dracula Daily first started to keep up with it. Now that I have read Dracula multiple times over I do think that I should start posting more. I am not quite sure what about though.
Like a lot of people looking to better themselves in the new year, I too have decided that this year, 2025 is going to be the year I get my act together and finally Do Something™. Like a lot of these people I have had the CGP Grey video about new year’s resolutions (called Your Theme) thrust on to my YouTube home page as YouTube is wont to do this time every single year. Most years, my “theme” (if you can call it that) has just been to make it through the year. After about eight months of unemployment with directionless meandering and a lot (and I mean A LOT) of bed rotting, I have had that very mature realisation of “I need a change.”
See as someone who is going to turn 25 this year, I have spent basically the last 24 years of my life in a kind of cynical space “looking down” so to speak on people who took things like new year’s resolutions, or even just anything, seriously. What a year of navigating the hellscape that is the tech job market in the year 2024 has taught me is that doing the things you are meant to do. I did school does not mean you’ll be happy. I went to university. I studied media in my undergrad. Worked as a content writer before crashing out of that. I studied information systems in my postgrad. Now I am crashing out after eight months of navigating an absolutely abysmal job market.
I think I am starting to get where all the adults who said “I need a change” were coming from.
So where do we go from here? We pick a theme.
For me, this year, the theme is going to be “less rotting.” I suppose it would be a good idea to go into what I mean by “less rotting” but I feel like that might be an idea for a new post. In a single sentence: less rotting just means to rot less (duh.)
Put simply, it is a way to take active control of my life and not just “go with the flow.” Sometimes “the flow” leads to a 4 hour TikTok binge when I should be going to bed. Modern social media content is basically designed to hack into the part of your brain that wants to mindlessly scroll and not make any decisions about the kind of media you want to consume. This, obviously, is not a new thing. The current form of scrolling is (i suspect) heavily inspired by the half awake multi-hour channel surfing binges people would go on at 2 in the morning in the era of cable TV. The temptation to just not want to make a choice is just too high. This means making an active choice in the content you choose to consume. Choosing the YouTube home page over shorts. Skipping out on threads and any and all meta products entirely unless specifically to post. Spending time to make a choice about what to watch on streaming platforms. Relying on word of mouth and in-media mentions rather than an algorithm to find new content. Just being more conscious about the media you consume.
Less rotting also includes activities that are not passive consumption, but active creation. This includes, of course, writing and making art of all sorts. Even exercise and excursions (just going out exploring your city or going to a new place) could be lumped in here. Anything that basically is not mindless scrolling.
To summarise, less rotting is the active alternative to bed rotting. It is making active choices about how you spend your leisure time. It is not about “phone bad.” it’s about “how do I make the phone the rectangle of joy and not the rectangle of despair.” That is what the theme of my year is going to be.
This is where this post comes in. I am writing this to calm my mind instead of just mindlessly scrolling through TikTok or the clones of it. It sure is a lot more productive.
I still need to work out how this works please be patient with me.
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