Overflowing Pocket

I use Pocket, which is a great little product, or it was the last time I used it several years ago. I still pay for Pocket premium because I have now gotten to the point financially where I can afford to forget about multiple $2/month subscriptions (see what I did there with the title?) and I tell myself I’ll go back to read all those articles I hoarded at some point.

My pocket is mostly full of what I would call nerd shit, as opposed to cool shit. Nerd shit becomes cool shit after a lot of processing - it usually takes me a few hours of nerd shit before I stumble upon something legitimately very cool. I remember reading about linguistics for a long time before I found out about all the ways that principles of language overlap with biology, but that’s for another article, one that I will never write.

Anything that takes more than a few minutes to consume on my Pocket is put off indefinitely. I engage with it almost as a chore now. I don’t enjoy it! I open it up and see a bunch of things I meant to consume a long time ago and never got around to and they just hang there as grim reminders of my lack of discipline and focus. I then force feed myself the articles, loathe the experience and then avoid it altogether for a long time, building up ever more article debt.

Part of it though is also the sheer overwhelm of information. There are pieces of the world that I don’t want to lose and so I hide them away in Pocket and wait to one day be completely isolated from the seething mass of Content that the internet has become so I can consume in peace. My information diet is for a bulk, when maybe I should be cutting a bit more instead. I should/want to filter out large swaths of information that are stored in my mind and are looped back to conscious brain regularly that don’t serve me very well - Simpsons quotes for example (jk, I will never let those go).

I’ve started to spend a lot more time pruning what I read, so Pocket has become less useful. I have all the articles that are coming out, my own writing (for revision), books, reddit posts, WhatsApp messages and I now also have a folder called ‘Compost’. This isn’t garbage. It’s stuff that has some interesting elements that need to be purified and recombined with the right amount of sunlight. I don’t have an idea yet on how to do that. I let compost sit for some time and rotate through it occasionally. I pick out one or two elements to write about. The important bit is not to stress myself out about the size of the compost - it’s not a todo list the way Pocket was. It is a heap of stuff that sometimes ripens to the point where it is usable. You just can’t Pocket-mulch.