Collecting versus enjoying

I feel like I've become someone who enjoys the idea of something more than the actual thing itself.

I've become a collector of people's thoughts. All without ever having read many of those thoughts.

How so?

Well, I've been using Reeder as an RSS app for the last few years.

If you don't use RSS yet, it's a way to read posts in a feed like experience. Twitter, but without the algorithm.

It's a great idea, and I'm hoping that more people catch on.

In the past I'd tried it a bunch of times. But it never felt full or vibrant.

Each time I'd just stop and go back to social media. Finally, a friend shared his process for using RSS, and gave me his whole lists of feeds he followed.

I took that list, added it to my Reeder app, and edited it over time.

Looking at it today, I have 265 feeds, spread across bloggers, newsletters, magazines, and more. They're also split roughly across tech, religion, and politics. Every day I get hundreds of articles I could read. This list isn't perfect, I'm always adding or removing from it, but it's pretty representative of things I hope to read, could read.

It's fun.

And it's replaced the itch I felt from giving up social media.

But there's been a problem. And this was partially explained in a podcast I listened to last week.

I've treated RSS like email.

Each article waits in a list, demanding action. I feel I'm letting writers down when I don't read their latest posts.

That's, of course, not true at all. Nobody misses if I didn't read a thing.

But RSS apps are designed this way.

Brent Simmons might have a solution to it, but his idea is still in beta. As he shared (I'm struggling to find the link now), the reason is all RSS apps are designed like email inboxes.

Someone wrote a piece doesn't have any expectation of me reading it.

But I feel like I should read it, and take action.

Right now I have a system for going through my feed.

If I see something that grabs my attention, I save it for later.

In fact I do that more often than just reading the thing right then and there.

It's easier to tell myself that it's a good topic for future me, but current me needs a quicker fix.

Sure, that's a piece of the economic value of a certain widget in the supply chain? Just my kind of jam. But later me would surely appreciate that, yeah let's save it for him tomorrow.

And so I capture hundreds and hundreds of articles for later.

It seems somedays I'm capturing ideas more than reading them.

Collecting is fun. And saving an idea is as much of a dopamine hit as actually absorbing the idea.

But probably the more interesting reason I do this is because of feeling a need to take action. Sometimes I'll start reading a thing, only to realize it's impactful and might be good for me. So I save it for future me.

It's good to feel motivation to shift my thinking.

That's fine. That's necessary, in fact.

Great reading should inspire change.

But, putting that burden on myself in the few moments I choose to scroll through the Reeder—well that's a bit much.

So I'm trying to loosen things up a bit, relax the internal restrictions I've felt on making my reading time feel like another thing in my life that demand I do it perfectly.

In the last few days I've been setting aside short time periods to grab my iPad, go to a comfy chair, and just read through articles for fun.

Instead of setting the expectation that I have to do something big with my life from reading something, I just write down a note in an ideas doc, and continue on.

Similar to my approach to reading books—don't force yourself to complete, allow yourself instead to drift and follow inspiration—I'm realizing I can bring a similar mental space to short form content.

Yes, there's value in building up muscle to enjoy a good long form piece. But I'd rather remove some of the internal pressure and just allow the words to flow over me. I can internalize them, and allow myself to not take immediate action.

We'll see how this goes longterm. I'm hoping to create a replacement for Reddit.

That said, I'll probably hit publish here, then grab my phone and refresh the NBA or Apple subreddits.