At the end of last year and the beginning of this year, I seriously thought about making the decision to go analog as much as possible in my daily life and blog about it. I don’t think I ever mentioned it, but I had collected a lot of research and pondered what it all meant. Then life hit in January and it didn’t happen. 

Obviously I can’t go completely analog, but I have grown increasingly tired of dealing with technology. It has only gotten worse as the year has progressed. The last couple of weeks have been one thing after another.  

I have thousands of comments on my blog, but sometimes one just sticks with me for years. These two sentences that Peggy wrote in 2017 often come to mind.

I think the Amish are right in thinking that even technology that’s as simple as buttons for your clothes can radically affect how you actually live. It’s a challenge with each new technology to find out what it’s good for, and what it isn’t. 

So what are some little things we use all the time that impact how we live our lives even when we don’t think about it? 

• Every item you own in your house or garage impacts how you live.
• Every service you sign up for online or in real life impacts how you live.
• Every email list you sign up for online impacts how you live.
• Every bookmark you set in your browser impacts how you live.
• Every tab you have open while you are online impacts how you live.
• Every old thing you leave in your home rather than getting rid of it impacts how you live.

And on and on.

One topic that comes up frequently in our home is just how ridiculously complicated life is now. I think being early Gen X parents with a Gen Z daughter gives us lots of interesting angles to discuss. Caroline finds movies from the 80s and 90s interesting because she can clearly see how life was so different. War Games is a great example of that. Yesterday she watched You’ve Got Mail with me for the first time. The movie offers an historical perspective in terms of computers and going online as well as an idea of what it was like for her own parents to meet online in 1996 via AOL. (By the way, a Starbucks in the movie was $2.95.)

But, yes, life is so ridiculously complicated and over the past two weeks things kept piling up in this area. I hit a wall with it all and said to David that I understand why “older women” simply check out of the real world as much as possible. I see this discussed frequently in blog comment sections and feel conflicted about it. On the one hand, I understand it. I understand the desire for simplicity and wanting to protect your mental health. On the other hand, quality people checking out is part of the reason why our country is the complete mess it is. 

So what happened recently? Many things. None of these are terrible or life altering in and of themselves. It’s simply when they all pile up and especially when you have no control over fixing them.

One of my two Telegram feeds stopped loading on the page I have for it here. Not both of them. Just one of them. The plugin developer suggested a couple of things. That wasn’t it. So he had me contact Telegram help. Good luck with that. I asked for help on Tuesday and expect to never hear anything. So I expect that will no longer function at all on my website moving forward. It still works fine on the phone app, but I have no way of fixing it here. There is literally no solution if I can’t get someone to return my contact request. 

I wanted to delete all my tweets and reset my Twitter/X account to none rather than deleting the account. Twitter offers no way to do that which is ridiculous. You have to use an outside company. So I chose one that was an official partner, studied the options, went through the process of getting everything connected (including giving them access to my Twitter account), and then discovered AT THAT POINT that I would have to pay to delete everything. It’s not clear when you start that this is the case. So I either have to manually delete all 4,700 tweets or nuke my account. I stepped back and didn’t make a rash decision even though I was so angry. Why do we not have the ability to delete our own content? It’s ridiculous. Why do companies lead you along and then put you in a situation where you are basically a hostage? Either pay us now or all your efforts are in vain. It’s evil. It is. 

The developer of the WordPress theme I use announced a neat new search feature that is now built into the theme (which I do like and am very happy with). I started the process to set it up and then discovered I have to connect to another service (which was not clear in the promo material). So I go to all the trouble to connect to the other service and then discover that in order for it to work on any significant scale you have to pay for that other service at a baseline of $25/month. Realistically, you’ll have to upgrade even more than that. This was absolutely not clear. I emailed the theme company and nicely explained that they should be honest with their customers about this (and something else that had happened last year). I received a very nice email back from one of the owners. But the point remains that it felt like a bait and switch. So I lost all that time setting it up and had to take the time to unwind it all.

The constant need for passwords and now the stupid two-factor authentication where it’s not enough that you have a strong password and answer a security question and promise to name your firstborn after the founder of their company, but you also have to get a multi-digit passcode by text or email so you can get into your stupid account for whatever website you are attempting to access. Because no one will actually prosecute the criminals, we are treated like criminals every day of our lives. 

And the Google core update for March finished up. My traffic is down 75-80%. There is nothing I can do about it. I can write great, helpful content but if no one can find it then what is the point? 

Those are just the ones off the top of my head. I’m sure I missed some others. 

So by late this week I was just so over all of it. I turned off the Buy Me a Coffee service and took down all the information about the Membership after spending hours working on it this month. Why bother doing it if no one can find my website? 

I’ve hit the point where I just want to join the ranks of the older women. Block out what’s going on, leave comments on other simple blogs, and forget about doing anything else. 

There is no point in thinking about the future of what I could do here if no one can find what I’m doing.

So I’m guessing maybe there was a reason for the idea of trying to live a more analog life this year. Maybe all this has happened to tell me I was on the right track and I need to revisit what I was thinking about. 

Like the Amish and the buttons, every single thing you add to your life complicates it. Some of the complications might be worth it, but I suspect most of them are not if we are truly honest with ourselves. 

The wisdom comes in knowing when to walk away and live life on your own terms. 

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