Fighting newness

I keep looking at my digital garden and seeing all the timestamps that haven’t budged since March. I keep being like, “damn, just make something already.”

But that’s a bad habit. The corporate internet is sooo saturated with newness – new post, new story, new tweet, etc. Content goes stale so fast these days, for no reason other than there’s so fucking much of it that there’s no space left on the shelf for the older stuff. There’s not really any inherent value in newness – it doesn’t always (nor does it often) translate to quality.

Last summer, I was doing some research about a trip to Iceland and found myself ignoring anything that was posted before 2018 because it felt too old to me. While that was 4 years ago, if we exclude the COVID timeline with the tourism industry coming to a standstill during that time, that content is really only 2 years old. Even still, I wasn’t even looking at potentially volatile recommendations like where to grab dinner or which walking tour to take – I was looking at scenic routes to drive. As if 4 years could really impact whether a particular waterfall is worth taking a 2-hour detour for. Like I said, it’s a bad habit.

This also makes me think about how trends used to cycle through in periods of ~20 years, but mid-2000s fashion is already making it’s way into mainstream fashion again. The abundance of inspiration through the online world means that trends move a lot faster than they used to, too. Mina Le also discusses this in her video gen z vs. millennials: who’s right about their jeans?

So I’m trying to remember that I’m still unlearning that. Digital gardens are a way of being like… not everything has to be new all the time. Sometimes we can just keep on thinking about stuff without writing it down. Sometimes we don’t even have to think about anything at all for half a year.