My minimalism era so far / Radio Gaga
As I wrote in one of my last blog entries I am moving places. While I live in our old place for some weeks until my work contract terminates my girlfriend already lives in our new place where we moved all our belongings to. This means more or less I am camping in an empty flat.
The plan is simple: As soon as I am done at my old job I move out. To make this simple I have only as many things left in our place as I can put into my Opel Corsa. This way I can move out without doing several runs over the 4-5 hour drive to the new place. Also as a side effect this makes for a fun experiment. I can try to live with as few things as possible and really take minimalism to an extreme degree without having to think much about the consequences of accidentally throwing away something and having to buy it again because it turns out that I need it because for me its all temporary.
When planning for this you have to make some sacrifices. For example I am currently sleeping on an air mattress instead of our bed and my night table is a cardboard box. However, and it kind of feels like cheating, I still have our dining table because we bought a different one for the new place and this one will be sold as a few days before moving out, so its not 100%empty.
As for Hobbies and free time activities I actually don’t feel too many restrictions, because the stuff I spend my free time with doesn’t require bulky equipment. I don’t have a big pc that I would have to haul around, my main computer is a laptop (I used a raspberry pi kind of as a main computer as well, but even there I stored all my files on the cloud so there is nothing I don’t have access to with my laptop). I can even use my Ipad as a second monitor for productivity. As for gaming I packed the TV and the Xbox into boxes and shipped it away, but I have Max Payne and Stardew Valley on the Ipad. I still have my camera and a few lenses here, they don’t take up much space to pack and I have my ebook reader.
I used an unlimited data E-Sim for Internet which worked quite well for the most part, with one of the only downsides being that the building is made of thick concrete and kinda reensembles a bunker in the way it is built which means I have place my phone at a window in order to get a working connection. By using an E-Sim I could see how much data I actually used up and it actually was a surprisingly low amount, even if I watched some videos on Youtube because mostly I don’t watch in full HD but 720p or even 480p if its just a podcast. Because of this I didn’t renew the unlimited data plan and just used my normal mobile data budget after the unlimited data option expired.
This actually really transformed the way I used my free time. Normally when I am tired I just default to watching youtube content, but now I would actually read a lot more because subconsciously I still try to conserve data even if I know a lower resolution video doesn’t really eat that much into my budget. If It became to quiet for me in the emptied flat instead of watching some streamers scream at each other I would default to the cheap FM radio I bought when I moved into the flat when we also had no Internet. Normally I listen a lot to radio when driving as l mostly don’t care to prepare a playlist in advance and there are so many channels that after some time you find a rotation of several ones with really solid music choices or talk segments. Aside from driving however I didn’t spend too much time listening to the radio before.
One of the things that I really learned to appreciate is talk radio. I actually prefer it over podcasts as with podcasts sometimes you have choice paralysis and tend to stick to the same few subjects that you know will interest you over the next half hour. In talk radio you tune in and get thrown into some heated debate over politics or a documentary on school lunches and teaching kids how to cook. Of course you don’t hit gold every time you tune in but I guess I can safely say that my life has become somewhat enriched by this. There are surprisingly numerous situations where I could add something to a discussion just by having heard a conversation on the radio and it shows that confining ourselves to a small bubble of what we think is interesting and cool doesn’t always produce the most interesting experiences. Its what Apotify and Apple Podcasts/Music keep trying to imitate with their discovery algorithms, but there you still always have the skip button so I guess it doesn’t really work in the same way.
You also get to hear songs that the streaming services probably wouldn’t suggest to you and get to hear about the artists background and much more.
That said, I think in Germany our publicly funded radio program is really great. Our public television is also ok but I often get a lot of the criticism directed at it saying its too expensive and produces just for a narrow subset of the population. Publicly funded radio here however is so diverse and covers just about anything from pop music to absolutely niche and fringe stuff over many federal and local publicly funded stations. I guess radio is a lot cheaper to produce compared to television as for a talkshow you can just sit 5 people in like a conference room, give them a topic, some food and some microphones instead of having to build a separate studio with a stage and production setup for every separate show. The smaller budgets and smaller teams you need when you just produce audio are really a strength of that medium which enables this kind of creative freedom for the radio stations and as a result they more often try new ideas.
Also I felt just listening to whats currently running kind of eliminated the fomo I normally get when Im into podcasts and new episodes with hours of content keep piling up in my feed. With radio I could just tune in and tune out again to read some pages or go outside as soon as I was bored. This kind of boredom wasn’t really annoying or bad in any way. It just was me having enough, and because I couldn’t just click on the next video or podcast episode I did many more things on a single day than I normally do and actually took the time to contemplate what to do next instead of immediately getting drawn into the next attention grabbing thing. I started sketching again which I didn’t do for ages. And generally even if I still am tired after work and come home late, at the end of the work I can count many more things that I did in my free time compared to how I spent my time when I had my TV and internet everywhere in my flat.
Also in the evenings I watched more movies again, as I still could download movies on streaming apps onto my Ipad while logged into public wifi at work and wasn’t constricted by the rather slow mobile hotspot.
I am curious how my free time activity will change again once I also move into the new flat where I have media and internet in excess again. Maybe Ill just take the radio and place it somewhere in the living room so Ill see it once I crave some distraction and don’t default to youtube.