Today I watched The Social Dilemma. Through an austere sound track and well-chosen snippets of the remarkable people responsible for the development of “social media,” the directors induced a true feeling of urgency and awakening regarding the “social” world’s present trajectory. As a brief summary before you watch it yourself: it is concerning but optimistic. In honor of the documentary, I shall keep this short so as to permit you and me to leave the screen as soon as possible. Also, I will not share my opinion on the topic, instead, just my first action inspired by The Social Dilemma. I encourage you to block out an hour and a half of your precious time to watch it for yourself; trust me, it is worth so much more.
So, what did I do? I have begun my own personal answer to the social media dilemma by making the wonderful machine I call my own a bit less fun to use. For me, this breaks down to three things: 1. Less gestures; 2. Simpler colors; 3. Cleared passwords.
First, the removal of gestures. I own a MacBook and one of the most wonderful features it possesses is its trackpad. Sufficiently large, perfectly smooth, and capable of precise multitouch, it makes the user experience pleasant and efficient. However, I have frustratingly noticed myself using a few gestures repetitively and without reason: especially the one to open the Notification Center – “swipe left from the right edge with two fingers.” Something about it is incredibly addicting having led to a compulsion to perform the gesture, even involuntarily on computers which are not my own and which do not possess this functionality. And so, I found the setting in System Preferences and have turned it off, along with some of the other gestures I use too often without reason. All which remain border on absolutely necessary.
I also have hot corners enabled, which are typically icredibly useful and I use them constructively quite a bit. However, for the sake of simplicity, I eliminated the corner I do not really need.
Second, color simplification. I believe it was the most recent update of macOS which brought some really nice cartoony scenic backgrounds. I love having them around and sometimes even think I work better knowing the window I am working in has a nice road through the mountains as a backdrop. Silly, I know, but 90% of productivity is your mental headspace, so it is important. However, I want to try to limit the visual stimulus and allure my computer has. Yes, having a nice background makes the computer using experience more enjoyable, but I would rather use the device only when I need to and turn my eyes to real nature and beauty. So, below are the changes; I also took the liberty of organizing my files a bit better and eliminating the nearly excessive number of Desktops I have. Even further, I have removed all non-essential, dopamine inducing, attention craving icons from my dock. Slack still remains as I am not really distracted by it and, if anything, it is a good reminder to work. Chrome, though it is a bit of an enabler, it is a very useful tool; I have dumbed it down just a bit to make it more “boring” (see the next paragraph). I also decided to leave the Launchpad button as I think the different colored tiles look nice; due to my position – student – and major – Computer Science – computer usage is inevitable, so I got to make the experience at least a little bit pleasant, right?
Finally, elimination of some saved passwords. I have tried to log-out of Instagram before on my laptop with the thought that having the additional step of logging-in would provide a barrier and time to consider whether or not to burn more of it scrolling; unfortunately, this only worked 97 times out of 100 because when you sign out of Instagram it still remembers who you are and makes it really easy to sign back in (see the left image). Then, if you like to keep some of your frequently used passwords in Keychain, as I have a lazy tendency to do, then the only true barrier to reentry after signing off is the click of the blue “Continue As” button; not an effective barrier. To remedy this, the easiest thing to do is clear the cookies stored in the browser pertaining to the website in question. In my case, instead of just clearing the cookies for Instagram, I said, “what the heck,” and cleared them all. Sure, some sites might not function as seamlessly for me as before, but who cares! The purpose of this after all is to make my computer a less pleasant place to be. Plus, I have two google accounts and only deleted the cookies for my personal account, my work account has been left untouched so all the cookies which make working more pleasant are all still there; I also do not use social media when signed into my work account, so it should not be an issue!
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