It’s an amazing tool. And I would love to see for much more younger people give it a chance.

If you want to give it a chance, the only things I would advice you to keep in mind are:

1. be ok with spending enough time using it… in slow motion. New habits take time and practice before they become natural, even more as far as writing goes.
2. Keep it as simple as you can. You don’t need to make it bulletproof/perfect before you start using it, quite the opposite. It’s an organic system that will grow and change at your pace, don’t force it into any preconceived direction because someone told you you should do it like that, or because it’s trendy. Don’t worry about categories or tags, or even about devising the ultimate numbering and indexing system. It’s wasted time. The system is devised for evolving naturally (one of the reasons I don’t fancy many of the digital apps: too rigid in their way) without ever needing to rebuild everything from scratch. To give you an idea, in my own system co-exist multiple numbering systems that I used and abandoned along the years, without any issue. My index(es) also changed a few times. But I never had to rewrite a single index card. Ever. Really, it’s amazingly efficient provided you don’t try to make it be the ‘ultimate’ and perfect system.

My web would be a lot more focused on static content, aka text content and a less centralized one too. Making for a much leaner web (less resources wasted to load useless crap) while at the same time making for a much slower web to… consume as reading takes time, which also means the necessity to carefully pick what one will read instead of doom scrolling and also spend more time/attention reading each pick, one can’t just glance at a block of text).

Hopefully, a Web less self-centered, with less fomo/anxiety/hate/anger/stupidity/numbness. With more attention and awareness to the other(s).

For any US-refugee still hesitating to jump continent… A lot of Europe also comes with

• Great (and affordable) food, no obligation anymore to eat that over-processed shit so many shops in the US dare call food.
• Great (and affordable) healthcare,
• Decent housing,
• Much better (and affordable) public transit.
• Not all as great as they once used to be, we can still offer you quite a few great schools to educate your kids, a lot of them not being that expensive either.
• Also, no matter where in the EU, quite a few Europeans will happily speak English with you, at least if you show you’re not too afraid yourself to start learning our own native languages ;)

I don’t, sir. It’s a gift from my late dad.

More seriously, I’m half-expecting some stupid shit like that to happen. To have some sort of control on who is allowed to use pen and paper… Unsurprisingly, this would happen at the same time people are considering the very notion of educating children has an obsolete and useless thing, since we now have AI to do everything for us, why even bother sending kids to school to learn to read and write?

also, should it be chunky and easy to click?

Should a doorknob be easy to use?
Should you pant zipper be easy to use?

Scrollbar used to be easy to use on computers, at one time. Then, designers took over the UI. Now, they’re only about look. Usability? who gives a crap about that, right?

Probably the same designers, or from the same schools, that decided it was a great design to have rounded windows on rectangular screens, I imagine. But who am I to criticize professional designers…

You’re right, save that search is nothing without a great index and it happens I have made one… If you want to know how an analog index works search for more info on what is a Zettelkasten, as my own ‘system’ is very close to that. Using that index I can find any book I’ve read (and my notes about it), any notion I’ve ever written about (be it a book or mere vague ideas),and I can find them in a matter of an instant. No matter how old it is, how short or how… flimsy it can be compared to other and much thicker parts of my notes and research.

Edit: https://zettelkasten.de/overview/ (it’s in English). To get a glimpse of a 100% analog version (like mine), check Luhmann’s work (the one who formalized the idea, an idea people had been using centuries before he formalized it): https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/nachlass/zettelkasten (this one is in German).

At my humble level, my system has become my second brain as well as a precious companion allowing for deeper conversations with… a better/smarter version of myself.

I tried digital mind you, I started using a computer in the very early 80s and must have tried a lot of those digital tools (even contributing money and suggestions to a bunch of of them), but as far as I’m concerned nothing beats pen and index cards and the most essential part linking them all: indexes (plural, as I use two different ones).

Liberating.

That was many, many decades ago. Never looked back.

Your thoughts are yours. Your notes should be too.

100%. And one of the two reasons I take all my personal notes using pen and paper. 100 % the analog way, as there is…

• no AI,
• no tracking,
• no ads,
• no subscriptions,
• no user account required,
• No (forced) updates & no upgrades,
• no bugs,
• Also, no matter how hard they might want to, there will be no law to make it so that paper now has to check my age when I’m using it, or for my wooden pencil to report everything I write down.

I don’t know what to do. What would you suggest doing? Thank you.

Re-learn there is something else than FOMO that makes your live worth living. How? 1) turn off news and social media. 2) Don’t turn them back on, even when it irks so bad.

Probably obvious but: used bookstores?

My own blog is so not worried with deadline or algorithm (not a single ads, and no desire to make a cent out of it, nor to promote anything) that it has no thematic and zero publishing schedule. I just checked, the last published post is from April 1st (isn’t that funny). Some drafts have been waiting to be published… when and if I feel like it which may very well never happen.

I used to publish a lot more many years ago, on other blogs and on social media, for a relatively larger audience, but then one day I realized that was a rat race (one that was driving my nuts) and that was not what I wanted to do with the time I had left to live on this planet. So, I stopped using all my social media accounts and blogs without giving any explanation to anyone. I just left. A few years later, under another name, I opened this tiny blog that I don’t really promote, on which I seldom publish and that, rather unsurprisingly, barely gets any reader.

The interesting thing is that I kinda like this blog, and the handful emails (no comment form on that blog) I may get in a year from a rare lost reader, a lot. I enjoy these exchanges.

It reminds me of the good old snail mail, people my age (soon to be 60) and older may remember. How we used to write to people all over the world and waited sometimes for weeks if not months (people were already busy back then), to get a reply. And how a discussion could last for years. Heck, with my best friend we wrote each other for decades. Plural… Even when we happened to live in the same country and city.

A bit like we used to play chess before the Internet, through mail. It was slow and a school of patience.

Has not been social for a while, imho. I left Twitter some 7 years ago (or more? Can’t remember) because of that feeling… I joined it when it was first introduced and it was so much different, so much nicer and sincere. Not perfect but really great.

There is still that around here, just we lack more active users and we would also gain a lot by being less… obsessed with politics. Imho, at least.

As for sharing hobbies: irl gathering are still ok-ish. Alas, oftentimes such event will be wrecked by some asshole trying to turn it into something they can boast about on their social media.

Blogs are still a thing, even though it seems almost impossible to get younger people to read outside of their favorite social media platform, blogs are there, very much alive if slower, and they’re as much about sharing passions and hobbies as they ever were when they were trendy.

Indeed.

Like the saying goes, ‘hell is paved with good intentions’… It just so happens that in recent years we’ve drastically sped up that paving business, turning it into a speedway ;)

Like already mentioned, we’re all part of the system.The re is no such things as ‘they’ are the evil we should get rid of, we’re the good guys.

More or less intensely, all of us are contributing the worst parts of that world we like to blame… while some of us do also contribute to its best parts.

I’ve been procrastinating on meditating and yoga for years but this may finally prompt me to train my mind to keep comtrol with the experience.

I don’t do ‘official’ yoga/meditation but I have my own version of those, including the long walks I mentioned, and it helps. And not just with tinnitus. With my whole life.

Regarding visiting multiple doctors it’s something I haven’t thought of and is a great idea!

Not even considering the possibility that one of them may be incompetent, it’s always a good idea to get multiple opinions. Doctors are people and like all of us they may not know everything about the issue at stake.

To give you an idea how it matters: had I only listened to the first eye doctor I consulted (a years long practitioner of mine), I would have lost my eyesight some 10 years ago. Becoming legally blind (I had already scheduled a formation to learn to read Braille). I did not become blind (not yet) for a single reason: I decided to get another advice. Thx to a a first doctor that mentioned some experimental type of thingy that was going at some place I had never heard of, and then took on herself to ask the doctors doing that experiment to meet me, and thx to them considering I could be good candidate, almost 10 years later I still see. To me, it is not just a daily miracle (it is, even though I’m a non-believer, it is the miracle of people being able to do scientific research and experiment), it’s also an acute reminder that one should never settle with a single opinion ;)

And btw, the first doctor was not an incompetent one. She was just not aware of the latest things that were going on.

I also talked with my psych earlier via phone and she said that the meds she gave me are safe and that she never heard of something like this so I guess it may not be entirely related to them but I don’t take her full word for it.

And you should not. Get another opinion. I’m not saying those meds are responsible (no idea about that) but they could be. And that possibility alone warrants itself a visit to a different doctor, if not two. Se my previous remark.

Disclaimer: (classical) music lover, here. With a lifelong allergy to noise. Suffering from constant loudtinnitus for the last 20 years or so.

Sorry you got that. It’s a sad shit.

Mine appeared one night, out of the blue and never went away. The next day I got an appointment to have my ears tested and the doctor told me I got tinnitus plus I was starting to lose my hearing (which slowly got worse as the years went… now to the point that I’m really considering I should be using hearing aids).

I’m unable to cope with and this adds to the burden.

I was unable to, at first.

Don’t fight it. To me at least, it was making it so much worse as I was only thinking about that stupid noise, it was everywhere I looked, so to speak.

Nowadays, I’m able to barely think about it… It’s there, I can hear it, like right now I just heard them, but I can also ignore them like I will ignore the roaring traffic noise coming from the street through the windows. Not all the time though. And it shows, when I’m overwhelmed by that sad noise, my spouse instantly notices it as I suddenly look… exhausted and very much unhappy.

You might want to check with doctors (plural) what you can do but what helped me the most was to learn to consider that ugly noise part of myself… Accepting it for what it is: one more limit I have to learn to live with.

Like me getting older each year (nearing my 60s) and not being able to have all night long intense fu…, sorry, not being that physically able to provide long lasting efforts, anymore. Like me knowing for a fact I will be immensely lucky if I manage to reach 70 years old, because I’ve already been incredibly lucky for the past 20 years or so to be alive, as I should not be.

The level of noise constantly comes and goes. It mostly depend how stressed I am but it’s not just that (it would be too simple).

To this day, my spouse is impressed how ‘easily’ I learned to live with those two whistles constantly blowing their uninspired single note and loud music directly into my ears … but the real secret is that I did not learn to control them. I just capitulated to their invasion of my personal space. The only thing I did is to study those noises (as there is a narrow range of variations between loud as fuck and just loud) and teach myself to be fine with them being there.

One thing that often helps me a lot when it’s too loud to ignore it is to go out for a (long) walk, without any music/podcast… nothing in the ears. Just me listening around to nothing but random outside noise… Birds singing are great for that, plus they’re great to watch too, and I will often try to walk wherever I know I might hear them, even though there are quiet a few whose cute voice I can’t hear that well anymore.

Herbal infusions can also help, or even a good tea. And just having a calm chat with my spouse talking about mindless things (we would avoid talking politics or anything stinky like that).

It seems odd to me for the thought of using it to refer to persons of a people without gender didn’t occur to Le Guin even while she was writing passages debating the biases of using the generic „he“ and its alternatives.

I consider her a real acute author. So, based on nothing but my intuition (I want that to be perfectly clear) I would rather question my own expectations and my own reading of her text than doubt she did not put in some serious reflection in it.

I mean, I would really not be surprised to learn she decided it was just not fit for the purpose she had in mind. Also, I insist on that aspect of the question, and that would need to be verified, but I doubt there were that many examples of such usage at that time and since she did not write the book for 2026 readers but for her contemporaries…

(non English speaking, here)

• I doubt many English speaking people had any idea back then that ‘they’ could be singular. Had they, I doubt that many ‘singular’ they proponents would have needed to fight so hard to make it accepted, you know.
• Maybe She she just decided they was not right for the way she wanted to write.

The references accompanying the quote from Wikipedia, at last the Oxford dictionary one make it rather clear it’s a much more recent acceptation to use it as a ‘personal singular’:

2009–
Used with reference to a person whose sense of personal identity does not correspond to conventional sex and gender distinctions, and who has typically asked to be referred to as they (rather than as he or she). (…)
In the 21st century, other th– pronouns (and the possessive adjective their) are sometimes used to refer to a named individual, so as to avoid revealing or making an assumption about that person’s gender;

Only mentioning a ‘generic reference’, aka mentioning an individual as a generic representative of some larger group (ie, a student) dating back from 1450…

So are the USA, to anyone watching what’s going on.

You should have a conversation with yourself if you let guns lying around for your dog to play with ;)

More seriously, even if it was free ticket or if I was getting paid to go there I would not go to the USA. Even for work, I refused to go there and did all I had to do through calls and videos.

<RANT MODE ON>
Why would anyone want to go there? USA despise the rest of the world, they don’t even appreciate those who were supposed to be their close friends (hi from the EU, guys). That’s fine with me, but then I’ll go spend my time and money elsewhere, with people who don’t consider it’s OK for them to spit in my face or put a gun against my head, and then tell me I should be thankful.

The USA is now a sinking country, with too much remaining power for his, and for our own good. Alas for the many good and great people that do live there and that I do miss spending time with. At least, as US citizens they’re still allowed to freely travel abroad, at least for now, to come and say hi… That is, if they’re are not too frightened (I’m not) by the perspective of most EU capitals being nuked by Putin, like his latest video/propaganda/love letter not so subtly hinted at… Which is, btw, another amazing achievement of that POTUS sad clown. To those US people too frightened to come say hi in Europe, afraid of being vaporized by a Russian nuke, I would happily have instead suggested they go visit their other close friends in Taiwan, but I’ve heard the mood is somehow not much better over there…once again, thx to the unique genius of the king of the deal. Maybe they would be more warmly welcomed in Iran or in many of the Middle East countries? Don’t quote me on that, though.
<RANT MODE OFF>