How I'm coping.

Life A couple of weeks ago I asked a question. The question was about how, now that everything is available (pretty much) how do you cope?

I genuinely needed some advice. I even asked Metafilter too.

The result was a range of replies on Twitter, three whole comments on the post itself (which is some sort of record for this place) and tons of ideas on said community discussion board although in the end (after my clumsy editing of the blog post) they decided I probably need therapy.

After collating all of this, here's what I've done and am doing:

(1) Deleted online backlogs. Pretty much. One afternoon I went through Pocket, read a couple of the longer articles I'd been looking forward to about film and deleted everything else. Same for YouTube playlists.  Just about.

(2) Film wise: one of the Ask Metafilter people said quite rightly that the pile of blu-rays I have are bought assets so I should prioritise them. So I am between ...

(3) Watching Lovefilm disc when they come in. Which seems counter intuitive but it gets me out of the "list" culture (Disney in order etc) and also takes the choices away from me to a certain degree.

(4) Box sets: if I've bought them, I should watch them. Still working through Alias. Then Yes, Minister. Then Northern Exposure. But slowly.

(5) Television: only if its something I'm genuinely interested in and make fewer appointments to watch. That's what catch-up is for. But if I miss something it's not the end of the universe.  Plus television series, even the quality programmes, are ultimately in the end saying the same thing over and over again.

(5.1)  Television documentaries as a format are broken.  Too often we'll be forced to sit through hour long documentaries with about half an hour's material, even less, stretched to fill the duration, or even an hour's worth of research pondered through three hours because the structure is dictating rather than the detail of the subject.  The problem is you sometimes don't realise that until half an hour in.  Don't know what to do about that other than to stick with presenters I like or tested formats.

(6) Reading: books in the house, magazines I've bought (unless spoilers). I've dramatically cut down on the RSS feeds I read.  Since I'll never know everything, I'm trying to learn that it's ok not to even try sometimes.

(7) One of the best pieces of advise I had was from the commenter mumoss on here:

"In the end, I've thrown up my hands and given up. Experience all you can, try not to get upset at what you don't. There's nothing you can do about it. Just try and be joyous that we live in a world where this is a problem. I'd rather have this issue than being bored for the rest of my life."

Amen.

The underlying problem is still there.  If you're interested in everything, you can lose sight of what you're really interested in, but I'm hoping that will slowly emerge.  Again.