The age of Debloat and Nosurf

Lately I've been in interested in debloating my life. Cleaning up my space, digitally, physically, and spiritually.

One way I've done this is by selling old stuff I have no more use for. This spring that's been: my broken ds lite, my ASUS monitor, DS games, my wii, my unused Minolta film camera, my old spectre laptop, and most importantly my 2019 custom pc rig. Facebook and ebay have been my friend. Sometimes there's a note of sadness when letting things go, but in this case it's been a release for me. Burning my karma, and clearing space for the new. I'm not the cleanest person, but a clean space can be a clear mind.

Another way I've done this, is re-evaluating my digital ecosystem. I tried to start on the OS level, favoring the slick minimalism of Linux Distros such as CachyOS, Linux Mint, and Pop! OS. In my case, I'm not really a power user so I didn't really benefit from the customizability of Linux. I could see it being useful on weaker rigs, or a cool Thinkpad side project (if they ever go down in price geez).

To make the most of Windows 11 (rip Windows 7), I've utilized tools such as Chris Titus' debloat tool to remove some of the bloatware of the Microsoft ecosystem. That's cutting out telemmetry, edge browser, and copilot among other bloat. I don't clog the desktop with folders, and I use custom Windhawk scripts for a cleaner look across the UI.

To cut down on scrolling I've set screen limits on all social media on my phone through ScreenZen. For Twitter, I've utilized the Control Panel for twitter extension to remove the for you page, post metrics, the explore sidebar, Grok, etc. It's basically a stripped down chronologically following page, and I can trim down accounts as I need to. For YouTube, I've utilized multiple extensions to trim it down. The Youtube Watch Later Tidy extension to wipe my 14 year back log of saved video. Honestly a lot of it was political or finance junk from 7 or more years ago. Additionally I've used PocketTube and UnHook to delete a lot of old subscriptions, remove the homepage, shorts, trending, recommended videos, and more. I use the paid extension DeArrow to replace clickbait thumbnails with generic screen grabs for each video.

In this day and age, you have to earn my attention, and these changes reflect a step towards debloating and removing scrolling from my life.