Tag: Caped Gooseberry

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How to Live Without TV (a Past Post)

This post was originally published over five years ago, but it echoes a book I am currently reading (or possibly the book echoes the post – they were published in the same year). In Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport writes, “you’re more likely to succeed in reducing the role of digital tools in your life if you cultivate high-quality alternatives to the easy distraction they provide. For many people, their compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life.”
Oof.
I feel Past Me provided some good advice here for Present Me on how to not get sucked into the small screen. So, bearing in mind that we’re not just talking about TV here, how do you live without TV?

  1. Remove TV from house; delete all TV-related tabs, apps etc.
  2. Ta-da! You are living without TV.
black and white drawing of a TV dumped in a rubbish bin


Except what we really want to know is not how to live without TV, but how to thrive without TV. (Side note: if English was a more sensible language, that would have rhymed and been an all-around more catchy sentence.)

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Rumours of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

There are two kinds of blog readers: the kind who notice when someone doesn’t post in a while, and the kind who notice the silence only when it ends. I am of the latter sort, myself, but for those of you who are of the former, this reassurance: I am indeed alive.

Alive, but not in the best of health – hence the nearly three month silence. After struggling for some time with a variety of issues with which I will not trouble you, I have now received a “working diagnosis” of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (which, yes, is what the Caped Gooseberry has had for lo these many years).

Sitting up – as opposed to sitting down – is something I don’t have as much energy for as I used to, so sitting up at the desk for the hours needed to produce a blog post on the computer has not happened in some time.

A painting of a woman dressed head to toe in flowing blue-black, collapsed on a green sofa piled with cushions. She is looking at the closed yellow book in her right hand. Her left hand dangles off the side of the sofa.
Battery unexpectedly flat.
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This Is It

If there’s one subject on which I have written a good many words over the years, it’s the topic of Getting Rid of Stuff. Way back in July 2014 – nearly ten years ago! – I was Feeling the Urge to Purge. Then in September I was wondering how much distillation it would take to get Drunk on Life.

By late February 2015 an alert reader was commenting that “The number of times you talk about purging, your house must be completely empty by now,” – and that was just before I’d posted about The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.

I regularly listed things I was getting rid of as 2015 continued, pausing in July to toy – for the first time – with the idea of Zero Based Budgeting: starting from zero and adding in what I was sure I wanted to keep, instead of starting from Dear Me What A Lot and subtracting only what I was sure I didn’t want to keep.

Black and white. An empty room with a fireplace, an open door, and a busy floral pattern in panels on the walls.
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