Post 003 of #100DaysToOffload

I think that this topic has been covered by a lot of more visible people already. I’m not sure I have anything of value to add to the conversation. I wanted to write this more as a means of me clearing my own head about the topic than I did to provide any sort of solutions.

I think this divide started for me decades ago when I switched my note taking from paper to digital notes. Like a lot of people, I have fallen into the procrastination trap of organizing organization tools instead of doing the work I needed or wanted to do. Part of that was spurred on by staring at the reams of paper notes I had made and chasing the cathartic task loop of moving to digital note taking.

This was not an immediate switch and it took a long time to make the move. Of course, once I moved, I had to iterate and find the perfect digital note taking option. I learned through this process that digital things feel more fragile to me than physical things. Whether this is real or simply perceived, I don’t know.

I was never good with backups, except at work, and back in 2016 I lost all of my data prior to that year with a hard disk failure. No company can take my notes from me but I can certainly take my notes from myself. Meanwhile, my reams of paper remain.

As an avid reader, I have gone through this same process with books. A few times now, I have purged my physical book collection only to rebuild it. Sometimes with different books, sometimes with the same ones. Meanwhile I have hundreds of eBooks and a Kobo Aura. The physical experience is nice and feels a bit more permanent. It’s easy to avoid or remove DRM with eBooks, so I’ve kept a mix of both.

Periodicals were more difficult. My fondest reading is in magazines and newspapers. Given their rich layout, they’re often presented as PDFs digitally. This experience is subpar to physically thumbing through them. I have solved this by using a laptop that converts into a tablet. It’s not perfect but it works.

Music is an odd thing for me. I used to have tons of CDs, tapes, and records. I go through spells of pretty severe music fatigue regularly. I find music often irritates and distracts me. I liked to have the physical items more for looking at the artwork than listening to the tunes recorded on them.

When I started to amass digital music, it was always ephemeral to me. I didn’t care if it disappeared because I would get exhausted with it quickly. That made services like Spotify attractive. More than Spotify, I have preferred Internet radio stations because I don’t have to store anything and others curate the content.

More recently I have been purchasing CDs again. I forgot how much I enjoyed the artwork and my vehicle has a CD player in it. I haven’t acquired too many pieces but I like what I have so far. It remains to be seen whether or not I will continue on this path.

I have never been interested in movies or television. That is not to say that there isn’t the odd show or film that catches my attention. I don’t know what it is but anytime I’m watching a movie or show, I have a nagging feeling that I could be doing something better with my time. Because of this I only have a few DVD and Blu-ray discs, most of them belong to others in the house. This is another scenario where streaming media has been useful to me.

Games are where this thread really kicked off for me. In recent history, I have been playing video games in my leisure time rather than reading. This happens once in a while and I’m sure the pendulum will swing the other way soon enough.

With games, I may not have a choice in the future. It all seems to be headed toward digital-only rental services. I have enjoyed Microsoft’s Game Pass service but I think it’s because I don’t care to own the games available on the platform. I don’t like a lot of modern and AAA games because of all the live service, always online, mtx, battlepass, etc stuff.

For old or “retro” games, I find that I enjoy physical media quite a lot but it’s often too expensive. There’s a wave of speculation in gaming that’s been going on for a few years and has made some games far too expensive. However, a lot of those games will get ports and digital releases on platforms like Steam.

Where possible, I try to buy physical copies of games for consoles I have (unless they’re simply a key code on a disc). Anything else, I try to pick up on the PC if possible. Preserving these games seems like a difficult task because some of them will require Steam and surely that won’t last forever.

It’s hard to say how I’ll proceed with various pieces of media in the future. I do know that if I am to pursue more digital things, I definitely need to work on my backup strategies…