I’m tired of being pulled into streams of content. Everything on the web seems to be a stream of content: YouTube, Twitter, Hacker News, Email. These present me things which are not related to my current life or projects, and yet they hold a certain appeal: soothing me out of doing what is truly important.

It is true that some times we need to disconnect. Yesterday, my dad’s wife (a psychologist) mentioned something that I had already heard from a psychiatrist: the first thing I do after therapy with my patients is sit down to watch a TV series in order to disconnect. I can imagine the proclivity to take your patients problems into your personal life and the role of disconnecting, but creative people need to take their work into their personal lives.

Why is that? Because you find the parallels. Today I was listening to Robert Greene talk about self-transformation through work, and he mentions his “wandering years”: he held 50 jobs in a number of different countries, and he matched his reading in history with his bosses and colleagues, and in this way he produced a book. Should Robert be sleepwalking through life, he’d come back home after work to watch TV to disconnect, instead of threading the fabric of life into a work of art.

As of the last few weeks I’ve been bored with what these web timelines offer me, and I think: how to I connect what I’m reading online with my current work? I have two projects: mini-games for blank page, an update to the bézier game, and a third early stage project where I’m simply reading Goethe’s Theory of Colours in order to produce something into the future. When I notice I’m mindlessly scrolling I think: how do I connect current work with leisurely web browsing?

And I find it difficult to piece together a query I can ask google in order to get information which supports current work. I may think: perhaps others have invented writing games before, but searching for “writing games” does not yield anything interesting. It seems the web has become a low common denominator, top results are often blog spam.

What I desire above all is not to be fed content, but to seek what is nutritious for me. But the online world seems to be full of fluff.

I ought to be persistent as this is swimming against current. The material world conspires into putting you back to sleep, but one must awaken himself through whatever means are possible.