Decluttering

I find myself increasingly selective about what I read on my newsfeeds. Using NetNewsWire makes subscribing to multiple feeds just so damn easy that I recently found I was trying to keep up with hundreds of feeds every day and was spending most of my time doing it. Apart from the fact that many articles are duplicated on multiple feeds some of the stuff is such unutterable crap that I suddenly wondered why I was letting it clog up my brain and take up my time. So I've been pruning it radically recently. Pairing the feeds to some essentials (news & current affairs), some technology & science and some whimsy. First to go, I have to say, was Digital Spy which seems so preoccupied with the vacuous garbage that is Big Brother that over 50% of its posts seem to have been devoted to regurgitating the minuitiae of a dozen brain dead publicity seekers competing for their fame filled 15 minutes. Why I even subscribed is anybody's guess. I suppose some brief flare of interest was aroused by the Winehouse train wreck that seems to have weekly epsiodes in their posts. I suddenly realised, as I tutt-tutted over her latest skeletal photo that I and others like me were part of her problem and that my absence was required and now.

Since then I've been slowly paring down my intake of 'news' and so, I hope, prolonging my dementia-free years by a few months since my brain is not filling up with useless trivia at nearly the same rate as it was.

I was struck some years ago by the Alexi Sayle theory of finite memory capacity which states that once that capacity is reached, one is in danger of forgetting some thing really important like how to breath or walk since this knowledge will be pushed out of memory by the latest FTSE index drop or the knowledge of a traffic jam on the M6. Since I'm approaching my sixth decade that overflow point must be close. I have no wish to rush to a dribbling dotage and the purge continues.