Disentanglement
Indecisiveness, especially coupled with insecurity, is a very damaging thing. This year has been
full of indecisveness for me because actually the most important and incisive decision I made
in my life has so outweighed everything else that really what I'm facing is not so much indecisiveness, but the
horrible position of knowing that everything I have held close before is small and perfunctory compared to
what I have now and yet taking decisive action is deeply disruptive.
No longer do I have to choose between two sides of a coin, the coin has already been flipped. Really, I have to
decide if I am to stick firmly to my choice and not saddle in comfort on the fence between.
Since the combination of my six year old MacBookPro not being eligible for Mountain Lion and not having the money to
buy a new Mac (marriage and all that) the logical solution is to just change OS and learn something new. I'm not
happy with the things Apple or Microsoft are doing anyway (“cloud” integration). FreeBSD or some BSD variant
would be the logical choice for me but really I've got better things I want to be doing in life. For that purpose
I'm going to disentangle my data from the Mac and sell it (along with a bunch of other
good stuff).
I fortunately come from generations past that learnt to think using paper. If I have to cut off my right arm to
escape computer addiction, I can do that. Generations now and especially in the future will quite literaly be unable
to think straight without an electronic device in their hand. To them, life will be brutually stressful with no
inner peace to be found because they will be assaulted non-stop by disingenuous companies who have every kind of
life-sapping wares to peddle.
The days of buying a product and owning it wholly are gone. Now you buy a product and you neither own it,
nor did you pay for it all. You paid for something that is partially given over to advertise to you. You paid to be
advertised to by these “recommendations” and you cannot turn them off. Your screen estate has been turned over
to data-collection and adverts-by-other-names. You will be “social” if you like it or not, is the drum beat.
Your data is our data, goes the tambarine.
I want to escape that world before it is no longer opt-in, even if that means having no
Internet at home.