This week has been a bit crappy to be honest. I have spent most of it lay in bed, coughing and feeling weak and exhausted. My chest hurts and my head feels like its full of cotton wool and I am actually really tired of feeling this way. It’s only a week, nothing compared to what some people have to endure.
A lot of this week I haven’t felt up to doing much at all, I have watched a couple of films which is a bit of a first, I hadn’t watched a full film for a long time either. The rest of the time I have been trying to avoid looking at my work inbox/Teams because I know that I would (and did on Tuesday) get drawn into it and hours would quickly pass before I realised that I wasn’t doing as I have been told and resting but instead would have been getting stressed about the build up of “stuff” that I am going to have to deal with when I return to work.
This has left the remaining time to browse news sites and lurk on Mastodon, both activities that don’t do much to cheer you up. Doom, gloom and bad news… Just now I ended on a link to a YouTube video by Cal Newport titled The Perks of Living Without Social Media. In it Cal explains how he has never had social media accounts and the various benefits of living without social media (conveniently side stepping the fact that as a YouTuber he is very much using social media for his job, but we will let that one slide for now). It did make me think though and I realised although I haven’t got a Facebook account and deleted my Twitter account after Elon took that service down the toilet I still spend a lot of my time reading what others have to say either on news sites, Mastodon or YouTube. And its true there is a lot there that its better not to know or at least better not to let get into your head and affect your mood and how you think about things.
I guess there is a fine balance between keeping informed and letting the enormous deluge of information available to us all become overwhelming.
What I also realised this week is that when I am not working or thinking about work I don’t really have an interest or passion that I can spend my spare time on to help me to avoid doom scrolling. I guess this is how I ended up here writing this missive. Journalling is known to be good for helping to focus the mind and I have always thought that I would like to be able to regularly update this blog but never really manage to maintain any sort of inertia (if you look back at other posts on this site you will see what I mean).
Anyway the first task was to fix the site which I managed to break back in April while trying to change this blog from Hugo to Tina CMS. After a little fiddling around I managed to restore the previous “Deploy Hugo to gh-pages” workflow to working order and we are now back up and running.
Second step is to start updating here… Lets see if I can manage to do that