From my experience, a lot of exhaustion and frustration comes from loading up your life with things whose real, long-term price one underestimates. You might buy a used car that is cheap, but you risk spending time and money on repairs and mental strenght while worrying if it starts when you want to go to work tomorrow. Or you might start this fun new game but end up spending way too much time playing it because it is designed to make you come back, even if you should do other things. The point I am trying to make is: everything has a price and we do not necessarily know it.
For me personally, when deciding of buying/using a digital product, I made it a habit to evalute the amount of data I would trust a company (that is not end-to-end encrypted). We all know there are well designed services and apps that are easy to sign up to, free to use and horrible for your privacy and your well-being (Facebook only being one of the more prominent examples).
I used to trade-of design, usability, up-to-dateness and tried to squeeze out the maximum of entertainment or efficiency out of my selection of services (I have repeatedly switched between at least 9 task managers). There is evidence that too much choice exhausts and makes unhappy - so the one question I ask now:
With how much personal data do I have to pay?
And while this might be a natural way of thinking for me (I am a software engineer in the finance industry), it is also just a good proxy of how much dead weight I will carry with me potentially having to deal with data leaks. And especially with services where you pay with your data, the more data you generate, the more valuable you are. Hence, tthe provider has an interest to use psychological tricks or dark patterns to bring you back as often as possible. Leaving that behind can be very liberating. And on top of that, I have a very lean digital lifestyle these days:
- facebook? gone.
- Instagram? nope
- Automated E-Mail/push notifications? < 5 per day
What do you think? Is that a good general way of approaching your digital life or a niche that suits only me?
Submitted December 12, 2018 at 03:30PM by lateinit1 https://ift.tt/2UEBGFh
