I’m starting to get wary about free apps. It probably started with the purchase of Instagram by Facebook, but the underlying problem is a lot older. A few quick examples that should have tipped off my radar: Yahoo! ditching Delicious, the Facebook privacy kerfluffle(s), Readability versus Instapaper versus Pocket, and Google, Google, Google. Many free applications and services have a hidden price. We all know this. Google and Facebook use your data to sell ads. You’re not the customer, you’re the product. Of course, that applies to the companies that actually get your data, whether by asking or taking. Other free services just ride on venture capital until a bigger company decides to buy them. You’re still a product, but having you in their user numbers is what drives their value up, more than the data you put into it.

It’s quite the quandary.

I’ve entrusted so much to “The Cloud,” almost all of it to free services. A lot of my important files are in the care of Dropbox. I use Apple’s iCloud to store calendars, and move data between my phone and laptop. Google handles my e-mail, my contacts, and even my text messaging and phone calls through Google Voice. [1] I’m not so worried about Dropbox and iCloud. The former has paid levels that will keep it running, and iCloud is subsidized by purchasing Apple hardware. Google’s not likely to go away, and there isn’t much that they can do with my contacts, I suppose, except try and nudge them into joining Google+. That doesn’t mean I’m happy to let them…

Then, there’s specialized places, like Flickr that house my photos, and Pinboard for my bookmarks. Pinboard doesn’t worry me—it’s a paid service. I paid $7.54 to sign up around the time Delicious was expected to go the way of Geocities. [2] At the time of this post, it costs a little under $10 to sign up. Flickr, on the other hand, has me worried. It’s a mostly healthy organ attached to the withering, diseased body of Yahoo! and it’s attendant properties. Flickr has paid options, but there is a very real chance it might go away and take a lot of my pictures and memories with it. I have most, if not all, of the images I keep on Flickr stored locally, but I know there are gaps. I’ll need to throw down for a pro account to fill those in, particularly photos from my earliest days on the service. This is that odd case where a service with a paid tier may still die, but that’s more the fault of its caretakers negligence. Sadly, I can’t find another service that matches Flickr on features and price.

Every new, free service I see that offers something I might want now has me mulling over its longevity. Can I trust this service, app, website, platform, et cetera to be here in five years? One year? Six months? Instagram was independent for seventeen months before Facebook bought them. What’s to stop the next interesting looking free app from either vanishing, selling itself and my data to another company, or both? I want to trust these apps and services. Increasingly, it seems the best way to do that is make sure they get some money from me. Marco Arment is infinitely less likely to throw me under a bus by selling Instapaper to someone. Even if, hypothetically, he did sell it, the service doesn’t have much more data on me than a couple hundred saved articles. There might be something there to target ads with, but that’s probably a less viable solution in the long run than just charging a couple bucks for the app, and offering paid subscriptions to users.

I wish I had an answer, but I don’t have one. In the mean time, I’ll try to give money to people who are asking for it, and be cautious about how much I’m willing to share with free services. In time, maybe it will all shake out, hopefully in a way that keeps the Marco Arments of the world successful, and keeps people’s personal data safe. I can’t help but be pessimistic about the chances.

Sometimes, all it takes is asking a question. In this case, the question was asked via Twitter. For ages, I’ve had the idea in my head to do a music related, well, something. First it was a podcast, then a blog, then a podcast, then a blog again. I even signed up for a trial of Squarespace, to set the blog up, but it never reached fruition. With podcasting, I found it exceedingly difficult to sit in front of the computer and blab for an extended period about something, alone. Even if I wrote up what I was going to say in advance, it was still hard to do. Besides, if I was writing it all up, why not just make a blog post out of it? As for blogging, I didn’t just want another music review site. I wanted to tell stories, share experiences, and talk about what it meant to be a fan of something, not just search for what’s new.

So, the idea remained, unfulfilled, until I thought to enlist the help of others—namely, Andrew Marvin of Quarter-Life Enlightenment, and Matt Keeley of Kittysneezes. I had come into contact with Andrew on Twitter, bonding over mutual interest in self-improvement though the Back to Work podcast, and the work of Merlin Mann. Through his writing, I learned he was a music fan as well as a musician. I’d wanted to collaborate with him on something, and this seemed like a good thing to try with. Matt, on the other hand, I’d known for ages, going back to the days when LiveJournal was a going concern and way to meet cool people. We had similar tastes in music, and other culture, and when he started his online ’zine Kittysneezes, it didn’t take too long for me to start writing for it. Matt had been wanting to start a podcast, anyway, and he works in radio, which is always a plus.

There was some planning, a bit of back and forth on titles, theme songs and formulating a format. We did test recordings, and hammered out all the gory details that go into any collaborative effort. At last, on Sunday, May 6th, 2012, we all got together (via Skype), and spoke passionately to each other about what turned us into hardcore music fans and the band that ruined us. We also shared some albums we liked with each other, and fought with Skype. After a lot of late-night editing, uploading, and nail-biting on my part, we had Episode 1: Passionately and Ineloquently, which went up around 1:30 AM on Monday, May 7th. Whether anyone liked it or not, I didn’t care. I was just glad to have made something, and have done it with people who I enjoy the company of.

Actually, I did care. Fortunately, some people did like it.

The next Friday, we got our feet a little wetter, tweaked the format, and discussed the ethics of downloading. The next week, we talked about falling in and out of love with bands, and a week later about the things that make us like music. Most recently, we blabbed for nearly two hours, mostly about remasters, special editions, and bonus tracks—as well as Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Each episode is, I think, better than the last, both in terms of content and technical execution. I’ve been doing the editing on all of the episodes, except Episode 4, which Matt handled, and learning something too, every time.

It’s been great to learn the technical side of things, great to learn about new bands and artists, but just sitting with a glass of water, and chatting with good friends about the things we’re madly passionate about has been the best part. It’s proof that Obsession x Topic x Voice is a great way to make cool stuff. If you like the idea of hearing three complete music nerds talk about their obsessions for over an hour, this show is for you. If you like to hear about cool music you might not know about, the first half of each show is for you. In either case, I hope you’ll tune in.

Crush On Radio. It’s about being a music fan, and all that entails. I hope you’ll join us.

I consume a lot of media. Daily, there’s something new about either technology, Apple products, creative work, culture, and/or current events that gets downloaded to my iPhone and pumped into my brain. My RSS Reader picks up dozens of articles about these same things, along with a few dozen online comics. On every page of this website there’s pictures of the books I’m reading, and every month I get a credit for an audiobook. I get a daily email newsletter with interesting, curated, articles to read. I’m often prowling for new, interesting music. My Twitter and Tumblr feeds are constantly refreshing with links, commentary, and humor from people I like. Then there’s Facebook.[1] Oh, God, there’s Facebook and its endless stream of personal updates, pictures of cats, event invitations, calls to political action, game updates, event invitations, pictures of people, friend requests, and event invitations.

It’s overwhelming, and keeping up with it all is taking a lot of time. This has me thinking about the inputs in my life, and how many of them actually something I care about. For example, as much as I love technology, do I really need to get a daily recap of the day’s technology news via podcast? So much of tech news is the same stuff over and over, and comparatively little of it is compelling. Is this actually worth the thirty to sixty minute time investment? How much of what I’m consuming in content each day is signal, and how much is noise?

So, I’ve been trying to evaluate what comes in, and if it’s worth keeping. The criteria is entirely subjective, as it should be. What I want to fall into my inboxes of consumption are things that scratch itches I have. My itches are personal and heavily dependent on the medium. Let’s just pick podcasts to start, as that’s what set me off on this rant. I like to know what’s happening in technology, but only to a point. When it’s about Apple products, cool apps, actual new technological breakthroughs, and using my gizmos and gadgets better, I can’t get enough. When a show gets to the point that I can skip an episode or three with no guilt, that’s probably a sign I should stop downloading it. I’ve found myself gravitating to shows that have a distinct editorial voice about the things I like. With technology, I’ve been listening to stuff from the 5by5 Network. Something about they way they do technology just clicks in a way that a more traditional news show doesn’t.

Thankfully, that part’s easy. With RSS feeds, I wish there was a way to see how many articles I read all the way through, or Instapapered, or clicked through on so I could prune what I read a bit better. Awareness and mindfulness can take care of that. Each individual input has is own signal-to-noise ratio. Another example: for every really cool thing on Boing Boing, there’s a bunch of stuff I don’t care about. However, when they post something cool, it’s often really cool. Cool enough, at least, to be willing to put up with the stuff that I have zero interest in. Sources with less really cool stuff, however, I have to just put aside. The time spent filtering the signal from the noise could be better spent doing something else, even if it’s just spent digesting more cool stuff.

With social networks, things get a bit thornier. On Facebook particularly, but other places too, the people you’ve friended and followed are often people you know in real life. You will see them, interact with them, shake hands with them, hug them—and dropping them
from your friends list can be seen as a personal thing. The best thing the Facebook people have ever done was offer the option to unsubscribe from people’s updates, or to just show what’s “important” I do wish I knew how Facebook determines what “important” is, but if it reduces how much noise I get, I’ll take it. I’d love it if I could keep up with the people I care about in a way that allows deeper interaction and is less of a timesink, but Facebook is, sadly, where the action is.

But, once the noise is filtered out, as best as one can, we can focus more on what’s important to us. Perhaps more importantly, we can come back to things that touched us. In the “tap essay,” Fish, Robin Sloan discusses just how rarely we go back and re-read the things that we favorite, like, love, +1, thumbs up, upvote, bookmark, etc. online. There’s just so much coming in from the information firehose that we so often can’t go back and re-read, re-watch, re-listen, because we’re caught up chasing that next thing. It’s been said that “Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.” I’m not sure I agree. If what you wasted your time on came at the expense of something you should have been doing, or would rather be doing, or even something you like doing better, then you did waste it. It may not feel that way from the little endorphin rush that comes from each tap and click, but it is. Every click brings us a little shot of pure, full-strength dopamine. Don’t tell me you don’t get just the tiniest little thrill when you open your Twitter client, refresh your RSS feeds, or refresh your Instagram feed.

More importantly, this extends far beyond just your RSS reader, and Twitter account. Any sort of input source can have a signal-to-noise ratio that is not helping you. As long as we have the mindfulness to stay aware of what we’re consuming, why we consume it, and what we get from it, it is possible to control that incoming flow of information. You can’t drink from a firehose. You need a way to slow, control, and filter your inputs so that what you get is truly what you’re looking for, inasmuch as possible. It’s liberating to be free from the weight of obligation to consume everything, and there’s many ways to channel that liberation. You can use it to consume more cool stuff, or go back to what you’ve loved before. You can even use that time to make something cool for someone else. All of these are fine, but you’ll never do any of them while digging through the dirt for the diamonds.

“We procrastinate when we’ve forgotten who we are.”
– Merlin Mann

This is true, but what if we don’t know who we are?

There’s a box of business cards on my desk, the kind you can get for almost free though an online service. They have my name and the words “Administrative Professional” written in Copperplate Gothic. Patrick Bateman would be unimpressed. I bought them during my extended unemployment, intending to use them while networking to find a job. Of the 250 cards I ordered, at least 225 are still in the box, collecting dust. The rest simply vanished into the wind. One the one hand, I didn’t exactly go out of my way to “network.” On the other hand, I don’t see myself as an “Administrative Professional,” either. If that’s not who I am, then no wonder I kept procrastinating on putting cards in people’s hands.

I’ve said that I’m a writer, but for a writer, I certainly don’t do a hell of a lot of it. What I do a lot of is… well… In terms of real hours, I spend the majority of my time running between a computer and a printer, doing a task that—aside from moving paper from point A to point B—could be easily replaced by some clever UI scripting. The next largest chunk of my time, is spent on the phone trying to convince people to either donate money or buy a theatre subscription. Neither of these are writing. Neither of these are creative. Neither of these are who I am, or who I want to be. I’m in the process of trying to fix that by changing my physical location, but that’s really only a start. In the meantime, I’m at my job where I move papers from point A to point B, feeling my brain atrophy.

On the chart there, devised by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, [1]: I’m spending the majority of my time stuck bouncing between the “Apathy” and “Boredom” wedges. Why? It’s not a hard job, and it’s not a particularly difficult one. I can’t make myself develop enough of an emotional attachment to the work to make the lack of challenge worth it. Or, I should say that the emotional attachment I had when I started the job has withered away. Part of the reason why is that I never intended this job to be a permanent, long-term thing. This isn’t a career, it’s a means to an end—putting a roof over my head, food in my stomach, and money in the hands of my creditors.

There is nothing wrong with this. Per se. It’s the sort of work life that millions of people have now, and have had for decades. It worked for my parents, and probably yours, too. There are plenty of people who are content to have a job that is fulfilling on a purely economic level. There many not be as many as there used to be, but you can still get a Richard Scarry job.

Where things fall down for me is the conflation of what I do with who I am, and it’s an easy trap to fall into. So much of the American identity is based around work. So often, the first thing you ask when meeting a new person is: “What do you do?” I hate having to answer this. It’s embarrassing, at least depending on which of the correct answers I give. I could say, “I’m a writer,” and leave it at that, but that doesn’t explain why I’m waiting at the counter of the coffee shop at eight in the morning for my first caffeine infusion of the day, haggard and sleep-deprived, but well-dressed and carrying a bag on my shoulder . Clearly, I’m going somewhere. So I have to tell the nice barista, “Oh, uh, I’m a clerk for the government…,” then look sheepish, put the lid on my coffee, and run to catch the train. I am going somewhere, but I don’t feel like I’m going anywhere at all.

As I start job hunting in earnest again, I’m confronting a pair of questions: “What do I want to do that’s worth doing?” and “What can I do that will pay the bills?” [2] Then there’s entrepreneurship, which is something I approach in the same way one approaches a gorilla: warily. I have no ideas for products or businesses, unless you count being a fiction writer, which is only lucrative for people like Stephen King, and even he held down his share of shitty day jobs while getting his start. After the last couple jobs I’ve held down to support myself, and seeing the effects, I just have to wonder why I even have to compromise on what my shitty day job is. The current situation might not be so bad if I wasn’t coming home after thirteen hours exhausted and exasperated. When you expend all your energy on the stuff that forms the bottom tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the rest of that climb is made exponentially harder. Naturally, what’s at the top is all that good stuff of self-actualization, and—to mix my metaphors—it dangles just out of reach.

I’m not good at knowing what I want. I’m better at knowing what I like. I like technology, writing, music, art, and variety. I like having clearly defined goals I can check off a list when they’re done. I like knowing that what’s done really is done, and I don’t have to fix it unless I made a mistake. Where do any of these things intersect, and do they intersect in a place that also provides enough money to live on while I focus on what truly matters to me? Paying dues is one thing. Actively putting aside my dreams for financial security is another.

If what I do is who I am, and I don’t do what I want to be, what have I become?

If what I do is who I don’t want to be, then how can I change who I am?

If I don’t know who I want to be, how can I find out?

I had to be sold on the job before I took it. The proposition wasn’t a bad one: three hours a night, four or five nights a week, minimum wage with generous productivity bonuses, and free tickets to the shows. A couple of days later, I was on the phones trying to wheedle money out of elderly theatre subscribers. Somehow, I developed a knack for it, and it helped pay my way through college. I still work there as I write this; I need the money and you can’t beat the perks.

It was a risk. As my academic career progressed, I opted for something that would pay for rent, textbooks, and food in lieu of an unpaid internship and experience in my field. While it worked out in the short term, once college came to an end I was forced to compete for jobs with only a Bachelor of Arts in English and four years of experience calling people at dinner time to my name. I thought I could spin it into an entry level position in non-profit development, but nothing came of it. After a few months of searching, two opportunities had been laid in front of me. Option one was a part time, temporary editing gig with a local medical college that had the possibility of becoming full time. Option two was a full time job with benefits, but consisted of calling companies on behalf of tech firms to get them to take sales pitches.

With student loans due, and an itch to get out of my parents house again, I opted for the full time job, knowing full well it wasn’t what I really wanted. I figured I’d try it for a year, and look for something else if I was unsatisfied.

This was a mistake.

Sixteen months later, I was given the boot for poor performance, and entered the dark wilderness of my Lost Year. As I searched for something else to do, I felt as though I had been typecast. When someone looks at my rèsumè and sees "Account Executive" and "Tele-Sales Agent," I can’t help but imagine them going "Yeah, we don’t need some sales guy in this position," and putting it in the circular file. During my unemployment, it seemed the only people who I excited were headhunters desperately searching for warm bodies to fill entry-level sales jobs. I probably averaged a call a week from a recruiter, and you could hear their voices sink when I told them I was not interested in sales work.

I don’t regret not taking internships. I’m of the mindset that any work that benefits an organization deserves to be compensated in some way more tangible than "college credit." That stuff wouldn’t have paid my rent. What I regret is the choice of taking what looked like the safe thing—$30,000 a year and health insurance—over a chance to try something new and more aligned with my personal interests and education. If the Many Worlds Hypothesis is correct, then there is another universe where I made the right choice. What I wouldn’t give to switch places. I knew I wanted some financial security, but what I got was ten times more of what I had at my part time college job—if not more, as I was still doing it, pulling 52 hour work weeks for minimum financial gain. The powers that be dangled two carrots in front of me, and I took the bigger one, not realizing that the big carrot was the only one I’d get.

The lesson? Don’t compromise on something as important as what you do for a living, but that’s a hard thing to do. It’s been another year since my Lost Year, and I’m still doing something that isn’t what I want, and for less money. At least there’s an escape plan that I am slowly executing. The move to New York promises to give me new opportunities and new inputs to consider. I’ve seen the wages of security, and they’re increasingly not worth it. [1] Whatever the choices end up being, once they end up in front of me, I am going to take the one that appeals to me on more than just a financial level. I make this statement publicly, and I ask the couple of dozen readers I have to hold me to it. Risk taking is not something in my blood, but it’s something I’d like to put there. It’s time to stop seeking permission to be awesome.