Looking to simplify

I’ve been thinking some more about this past year and what I want from this next year after writing my goals post for 2025. I keep thinking I need LESS. Life is complicated and weird and hard these days and I am longing for simpler, easier things. How do we get there? I keep thinking about this thing we learned in Scotland and how it might provide some insights.

My everyday life

I was in the car the other day with my partner and we were talking about how everything these days feels so hard. You can’t just set up an appointment and go do a thing. The appointment is scheduled three months out. During that time you might have to reschedule once or they call and reschedule because the person you are scheduled with had a glitch in their schedule. You might not go to the same place because since you were there last year they moved to a new building so you have to find the new place. There’s more forms to fill out than you already did online. Or maybe you canceled the first appointment and now are downloading the app to get the thing done online, only to find out that the app just sucked all your data and has sold it somewhere. And now you are locking down all your credit at the bureaus because your information has been involved in some data leak somewhere. Modern life is all extractive or transactional and it’s freaking exhausting.

Learning from vacation me

This all has me thinking about being in Scotland in August. We rented a car and drove around a LOT. And I learned that in Scotland there’s a lot of one-lane roads. What happens when you meet other cars? That was a question we kept asking. Often there was just a ditch on one side of the road with a short, rock wall on the other. But spaced out along these single-lane roads are passing places. You (or the car you meet head on) reverse to the nearest passing place or you see there’s oncoming traffic, so you stop in the passing place until the oncoming car goes past. I was stunned by how well this worked. How well people cooperated in this new-to-me road sharing endeavor. And I kept thinking about how much money this likely saved on infrastructure. About how it probably allowed for actually MORE roads and better upkeep on the ones that are there. How it caused us to thoughtfully look out for our neighbor. We started eagerly looking for places to give way. Sure, it slowed us down occasionally but didn’t impede our ability to get where we needed to go.

I know you are thinking, Misty, you can’t compare your vacation ease with your regular life frustrations. Figuring out what we love on vacation and trying to integrate that with our regular life should be all of our biggest goals. And what a metaphor that one-lane road is! All of us on our own track trying to get somewhere. While also needing to share with everyone else and maybe even practicing some kindness along the way.

Thoughts for the journey

I keep thinking about how I want more of that cooperative sharing. How much I want to opt out of the machinery of my regular life. I’m sick of Facebook and Instagram and dead Twitter and Threads stupid nonfunctional algorithm and trying to figure out how to find people on Bluesky. Always looking for the next social media app where I might promote my work. I’m tired of trying to game these apps into showing my work to people and seeing the people I follow. Trying to be noticeable but you know, not so noticeable as to get targeted for anything.

I want to work on art. Occasionally meet and have a few drinks with artist friends. We can have interesting conversations about the things we are working on. I desperately need to balance out feeling like a cog in a machine with some more cooperative, nonalgorithmic-managed interactions. I need simple.

But I don’t know exactly what that looks like yet other than I might be keeping an even lower online profile on socials. I’ll still be writing here and I’ll likely be sending newsletters out. But if you aren’t seeing me on social media this is likely why.

What are you opting into or out of this next year? I’d love to know your answers! Catch up with me: on socials, email me, or go old school and leave a comment on this post.

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