I’m sick of opening up a new browser tab (chrome) and seeing Google and most-frequently-used web urls.
I am desperate for something different. A quick meditation told me I want NO news, and always feeling overwhelmed with social media, all forms of incoming media, be they text from others’ life status updates, or private messages. I can barely survive checking email once or twice a day. Been completely off facebook for the last three or four weeks, with exception of a couple moments to send a message regarding sending a couple friends christmas gifts.
I’m also sick of the recommended videos YouTube gives me: just because I click on Jordan Peterson videos, YouTube (somewhat annoyingly) associates that with politically conservative material. I agree with pro-free-speech advocates, but I get far too much material on it, plus the tone is usually a complaint or frustration, given it’s culturish warish. I’m needing more boost, with positive messages, life is better, get out into nature, throw a stick for a dog, play catch with kids. Someone very dear to me gave me a card a few months ago with “Grow” on it, and I put a leaf and a seed in it, and it’s forming some low level thing in my psyche… Often I need inspiration from others.
So.
Thinking about reading material, thinking about a page of education, maybe something that is a portal to inspirational quotes, maybe something from various ancient texts and such. I know of no such portal.
Would anyone have any recommendations, or just brainstorm ideas?
For a few years now, I’ve done the following system for YouTube to work around this.
I make YouTube brand accounts for every interest. So one for technology, one for politics, one for crypto, one for travel, one for comedy, and so on. And I move all my subscriptions from my original account to the appropriate brand account.
I also turn off all personalisation and data mining that you have the ability to turn off.
It results in a much better YouTube experience. If I want comedy, I switch to the comedy account, and get recommendations related to that. If I want politics on the rare occasion of masochism, then I switch to that account.
It really works wonders.
If you are on Android, then try the Less Phone Launcher:
My homepage and new tab page are both about:blank. I know for Google Chrome you can get all these nifty home pages. Popular ones I see in digital nomad communities are are “Remaining Life Counters” or “Age to the 10th decimal” counters. For inspirational things, perhaps do a search producthunt.com - they have a bunch of new tab page extensions there.
I recommend the Brave browser. It has a wonderful screen that shows you how much time you’ve saved with it’s built in ad-blocker (so that you don’t wait for all those trackers/ads to load in the background of websites), in addition to how many FREE ON-THE-FLY HTTPS upgrades that they’re making for your browsing connection even to sites that don’t have HTTPS. Brave was built by an (ex) Mozilla co-founder I think. Highly worth checking it out.
Brave can run any Chrome extension, it’s just a secure shell over the Chromium project. Eventually it’ll pay its users in BAT (Brave Attention Currency) for ads that they choose to watch.
Whether you use Chrome, or something like Brave, you can check out this plugin which I used in the past (with Chrome): (Momentum extension*)
I’ve also used something similar to this extension (Consciously Life extension*) but I don’t remember if it was this one, or something else. I used it mostly at work, where ads were replaced with photos of beaches and motivating sentences and such.
