A break was needed

The past couple of months, I was not inspired to write anything, to read anything, to share anything besides a tweet here and there.¹

The back-to-school period was tough at work, more or less from September to early December: lot of projects, lot of pressure, lot of things on my mind, so I started the days like I finished them: exhausted. The only thing I really wanted to do with a computer in my spare time was watching a movie or a TV show and unplug my brain for a few precious hours.²

My reading list — powered by the excellent Matter — kept on growing though, and I kept on following the tech headlines, but I could barely get into any of the details, as it seems that tech news somehow became boring as hell in the last couple of months, or was I just tired?

Companies with absurd names rebranding themselves with other absurd names, and one in every three industry headlines now referring to the boring crypto, blockchain, bitcoin, web3 topics, and all the NFT nonsense that keeps on animating intense debates on whether it is a scam or not,³ surely didn’t help.

Being tired and bored explains the blog hiatus, but maybe exhaustion and boredom just be byproducts of the root cause: growing.

Maybe I am becoming even more of a grumpy nerd, finally old enough to be able to be a snob about the newest tech trends, and perceive them as useless and dumb without putting the efforts to embrace them as some inevitable part of the future?

Maybe I have lost interest in technology. Am I now too old to care? Or do my new regular activities — like cooking, traveling, hiking — consume most of my attention and energy?

Also, I still kind of want to delete my Twitter account (I probably won’t though), I still kind of want to uninstall as many apps as possible, I think about deleting my Google account, and maybe try to live a less digital-centric life. I even wonder if I should switch my Apple Watch for an automatic mechanical watch, replace my wireless headphones for good old wired earbuds, and stop buying things online. For a while I also contemplated buying a new dedicated camera so I would not have to use my phone for everything in my life.⁴

But I won’t get rid of the blog, this was never even remotely considered. So here I am, rested, and ready to discipline myself into more reading in 2022, albeit digital reading, and more podcast listening, all of which should result into more writing on this very blog.⁵ For my the digital life outside of the blog, we will see how it goes.

In the meantime, I wish you all a very happy new year.