I'm going to start spending some time every day, pruning my feeds. I want to stay connected to new ideas and see what people are producing. But I don't want it to become a full-time job. So although it's easy to add free subscriptions to substack, for example, it's difficult to read everything posted. And after a certain point, it's difficult to find stuff I ought to read in my inbox if it's just hammered every day by dozens or hundreds of posts which, although they may be interesting and diverting, aren't really relevant. Before I started pruning, I was closing in on 500 free subscriptions. While I may be entertained and impressed with the quality of the writing in many of those, did I really benefit from spending the time? I need to ask myself this question regularly and continually. This applies doubly to stuff that just validates or supports opinions I already have, especially political opinions. I'm removing nearly all the substacks from my free subscription list that only talk politics. One of the first to go was Letters from an American. I can't remember the last time I read anything in there I'd call a new historical insight.
My pruning has unfortunately extended to some very recent additions I've made of Great Books or Syntopicon blogs. Although I found quite a few when I searched on those terms, there really don't seem to be a lot of these substacks left. A lot of people had said they were starting them in the past couple of years and then put up a post or two or sometimes only a "coming soon" message. In most cases, they haven't continued. I've dropped subscriptions to several after looking them over and finding there's nothing there. For a moment I thought about hanging onto them, just in case the author decided to get back into it. Or in case they might see that I had subscribed and take a look at my stuff. I wouldn't mind having discussions with other people interested in doing something similar in their own blogs. As I mentioned, a lot of them have different constellations of ideas (especially on politics and religious beliefs), so it might be interesting conversing and exploring the differences and similarities. In any case, I hope that by pruning the sources feeding my inbox I'll find more in there that I'll read and respond to each day, rather than passing it by.
Another thought that I've been having is that I'm not doing a particularly good job telling people what I'm thinking and writing about, in headlines. Seems like it might be more effective to write a headline that would at least give a general idea of the post's topic, rather than forcing people to read it in order to find out. I really appreciate that there are people who are willing to take a chance that whatever I'm thinking about today may be interesting. And the approach I was taking probably made sense for a while in a series like the "Journey" posts, which at first dealt on a nearly-daily basis with the retrenchment and my career change. Although I think it's still important for me to be counting (it's day 113, so I think that means I have 165 days to go before I lose my job), I'm going to start making that count a subtitle rather than a title to my blog posts, going forward.
Yes, adding post-specific headlines is a good idea! Goodness, 500 subscriptions?? Don't know how you could handle even 50. One possibility is to create an email address for just that use, to separate from other emails, then only search them occasionally for specific information. Another alternative would be to use Readwise specific email addresses to import them automatically, then use Readwise Ghostreader to summarize, and search to find and highlight useful information, and then have the highlights automatically imported into Obsidian with the official Readwise plugin. Ref: [How to Set Up Your Reader Feed - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hekAMJsAy3s)