My brother Will recently introduced me to LifeHacker.com. Click on that link at your own risk, as you will not just be embarking into a new browser window. LifeHacker.com is a way of life disguised beneath a URL and a slogan about how technology complicates our lives. Sifting through today’s morsel-sized posts, all delectable for their brevity alone, I discovered that it is possible to steer Google search results away from past internet indiscretions (incriminating photos, decade-old posts to Titanic message boards, etc.) I learned how to disable the startup sound on my MacBook (I don’t need to hear the electronic auditory equivalent of the rising sun dawning on a new day every time I boot up–especially at 3AM when I turn on my computer to watch puppy videos on YouTube because it helps me fall asleep.)
I even watched a video demonstration about retrieving a cork that has fallen into a bottle of wine, even though that particular hardship has never befallen me. But I’m going to store that little life-byte away for future reference. That is, if I can find a place to put it; I’ve collected so many notes and nodes in the month that I’ve been visiting the ever-updated blog that I’m probably going to need a bigger brain. Therein lies the hidden meaning of the term LifeHacker. Am I taking control and streamlining my life by hacking into it? Or is the philosophy hacking into my life?
Is there a hack to curb emotional and mental dependence on LifeHacker.com? Would somebody round up a blurb’s worth of info about active logic and independent problem solving? Is there a downloadable, or better yet, a browser-based web gadget that will compare a current problem with the existing contents of my brain and tell me when I need to refer to the LifeHacker.com archives because a solution hasn’t already been processed by my hippocampus?
I had break a similar dependency on Google when I lived in a flat in New Zealand without internet access or a functional computer. Circumstances forced me to brush up on life skills that the glow of my laptop screen at home had brainwashed out of my mind: reading paper maps without zoom buttons; scanning books and articles without the ‘find’ function; looking up movie listings in the newspaper. Oh, I also taught myself to keep a running list of things to Google the next time I did have access to the internet.
LifeHacker is a dynamic resource full of solutions for technological problems, productivity issues, and even more personal hang-ups that you may or may not know you had. But browser beware, because the chances that you’ll find a fix for a persistent and pre-existing problem often seem slim. I couldn’t find any information about an Auto-Complete command for one particularly tedious aspect of my job. There didn’t seem to be a new-fangled solution to my exploding closet dilemma. My searches for “bikini” and “flee the country” both returned zero results. I’m going to stick with casual browsing of the blog once or twice a week for now, but refrain from fully adopting the LifeHacker LifeStyle.
The moment they launch a category called “How To Be Emily,” though? I will hack out a way to tattoo that RSS-feed on my hippocampus.
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