2025 2025, August - News Routines & Posture
I'll not be a young adult forever, and there's a number of grown-up things that I'll have to get into the habit of doing if I don't want to start regressing in uncomfortable ways. Some of these are health concerns, some of which are just early onset anxiety about leaving the university circuits and thus potentially letting go of academia. The main tool I'm using here is my scheduler, so it's not technically focused on specific tasks, but rather taking the space in my mind to notice things I would want to pick up as a habit to function as person.
News
I've not been reading news in a traditional way. It's partially because "real" journalism is often paywalled at this point, and I have little patience for much of the traditional news reporting. It's just Gell-Mann Amnesia all the way down, and while I'm certain I'd still be better informed if I did stick to at least those sources, the stuff I really care about - which are rarely day to day news items - I can inform myself about by going as closely to the sources of information I would think are valid (papers, literature, locals handing in reports). It does mean however, that I miss a lot of stuff, because obviously I can't anticipate important events, so I should at least make it a habit to check dedicated sources I don't abhor using (looking at you, flipboard).
General
I have difficulties finding news sources that I can stomach reading over a long time. As such, I'm not determined to read as news at the start, but rather just finding sources that I like. Sometimes that goes through the authors of articles, sometimes I just find outlets whose format I like. I realize that I'm basically just building an RSS feed that I need to check by hand, but it'll do for now. Eventually, I imagine an actual RSS will have to be implemented to make my checking for news not a nightmare, but at the moment there just aren't as many sources that checking manually bothers me.
Science
I mentioned Gell-Mann amnesia earlier, and science reporting is the part that makes me object. While I'm not at all an astrophysicist, I have enough of a basis in physics to call bullshit on a vast majority of headlines pertaining to cosmology and involving whomever's rocket. It's a minor tragedy, in my case, because I find myself equipped to just read peer-reviewed publications, which I will choose to trust, until my beliefs calcify, or I find something that seems downright incorrect. It's not too difficult to go through journal websites and pull the sources from the bottom of the article, and while I won't get around to reading my findings on that day, and will always be behind the absolute cutting edge, I've always been okay with making that sacrifice in exchange for reading something that was created in earnest, and not from a position of hasty obliviousness.
Posture
I sit like a pretzel and I most commonly work at desks. I don't own a standing desk yet, which likely wouldn't fix screen-neck, and seeing as I would like not to have chronic neck and back pains in my forties, I should find a solution for it that doesn't end with a desk I'm not using most of the day.
I think there's really little I can do besides fixing my posture while I sit, which does make me feel a little silly, but after reading up what proper sitting posture should be, I try to adhere to it as best I can. This is less of a proper habit I can track realistically, but it's something I can prime myself to think about with the second part of this point, which is daily stretching exercises.
I don't love committing to deliberate physical exercise, and while I've never made any great attempts toward it, I think a Duolingo-esque streak mechanic might help me on the way. I'm using Bend, simply because it's simple and free, and it seems to do what I want it to do. Part of the project here is me seeing what my streak is at the end of the month.
In the first week of doing this, I'm realizing the main issue with physical exercise is really putting aside the time. It's silly, considering I will readily a couple of hours on my phone, but find it difficult to find five to ten minutes to stretch. I suspect it's having to wait for the timer to be over. Perhaps I need to find something to do with my brain while counting seconds, because - symptomatic for my generation - I don't really like being bored and waiting. If I were not contorting my body into shapes while doing the stretches, and using the same device for the timer I was using for reading comics and manga, I could perhaps read those. Maybe If I can shuffle a few things around, it'll help make it a less boring experience, and perhaps even make me do longer sessions.
Sometime around the end of the month, Bend started barring me from using it beyond some quota that is less than one routine a day, which makes it kind of impossible for me to form a habit around it, so I had to ditch it for something else, preferably something without the need to sign into an account. It's a nondescript application that has a decidedly worse user interface, but, as far as I can see, has almost identical content.
At the end of the month, I'm coming up with a streak of 12 days - which is significantly worse than I thought I'd do - but no use getting discouraged, right? I'll try to stick with it for the future. It's probably just correct practice, and since I'm very easily convinced to keep with a habit if I can get a streak out of it, hopefully I'll learn the exercises with time, and by the time I know them, I can do them without the app, which will make the whole ordeal a lot less boring.