Simplify the Web Small and Simple things

Life can get tedious. We can get so caught up in the daily, weekly and monthly routines that we can forget why we even do them. Without something new and exciting coming to our attention on a daily basis, we lose focus and interest, and we tend to become dissatisfied with ourselves or with our life.

What new and exciting things can we find on a daily basis, without getting too much out of the way of our daily obligations to work, family and self? Television series strive on this need for mental stimulation we all have, by presenting something new everyday. But these series are almost always repetitive in nature: they recycle ideas and concepts over and over again, putting a different veneer over them, different actors, different music, different special effects. They quickly become part of our boring, daily routine, and we get little satisfaction from them.

The trouble with most of our society’s ways to stimulate us is that they don’t require much thought or effort on our part. They all cost money and time, but they follow a PUSH model: they are messages sent to us constantly, mostly in an attempt to influence or manipulate our daily habits. Many of them are also designed to create a pseudo-dependence, so that we think we need them when in fact we don’t.

A few days ago, as I was thinking about all this, I read from a great book about the idea that, each day, there is something important to learn, even in the daily routine of our lives. I thought that our real need is not so much for daily mental stimulation through the senses, but for stimulation of the mind coming from mental exertion. I also believe that daily progression is possible, and that it is directly tied to how well we learn and apply the lessons of each day.

My decision, based on this lesson I learned, is to spend time during and at the end of each day, to think about what I can learn from the experiences I’ve had, and to record that lesson. That’s what a blog or a personal journal is for: not so much for others to read, but for us, to act as a sort of social mirror. It helps us to “reflect” more deeply, to concentrate on our emotions, our feelings, our interpretations of our experiences, and to make better decisions on a daily basis and in the long-term.