This is what I love and appreciate about Sophie (Malama Life on YouTube). Despite having over 750K subscribers and a lot of comments on many of her videos, she eventually finds the time to reply to many of those comments including the one I left on her recent video.
The reason she is able to do that is because of how she and her husband have been downsizing and shifting to a simpler lifestyle (part of that was from when they initially relocated from Maui to Portugal; which also helped when circumstances led to them having to return unexpectedly). Just that aspect including self-imposed unplugging often from the online world, allows her more time to perform this type of engagement (which is a huge part of the YouTube algorithm) when she does plug back in to take care of this necessary channel business. For most other content creators that have the usual hectic lifestyle and are this size, it’s realistically no longer possible to do that for most comments except the ones that are on the first day or end up having a lot of likes racked up by others.
Myself, I’ve done these sudden disconnects (turning off the devices often and tuning out); by that, I don’t mean just social media account deactivations, but also turning off most notifications (only keeping the priority/emergency ones) and shutting down by a certain time. It’s why I was terrible with Discord (I remember replying to a message over 2 years later since I rarely logged in and by that time, the recipient was no longer really using it). Doing it this way has always worked with getting grounded/focused again (and sometimes, I end up actually moving on like how I did with social media and most recently, gaming). I also usually end up doing “dump” blogging posts to write it out.
Part of me wishes that I could easily do the same level of downsizing (not because I’m a content creator [*], but more to reduce the need for that extra space for it all) to compliment unplugging more often, but I have the collector’s dilemma which is at odds with minimalism since that requires getting rid of a lot of things. Collecting has been a long running hobby for me though; something I’ve at least managed to do in moderation (like my gaming stuff is very narrowly focused where I also never got into the whole Funko Pop thing which would’ve been a nightmare). I also haven’t purchased a new coin in years now (coin collecting is where it all began).
I do acknowledge that I have way too many guitars even after I parted with 75% of them (I had over 50 at the peak), and most of the ones I have remaining are my favorite G-Life guitars. Some of these are still back in Japan as well (my other half who is returning for the next 3-months, is bringing back one of them). The problem with guitars is the amount of physical space they take up unless you hang them up on a wall. I guess I will see if I can work on getting it down to under 10.
I know it is just material possessions that can be eliminated if minimalism/downsizing is the ultimate objective. For myself though, it’s a balance of not eliminating the activities that I do find enjoyable (which is the collector’s dilemma). The bright side is I’m not the automobile, electronics, or computer collector type (I’m talking about the ones that have had to build a climate-controlled building to house complete computer systems from the past).
[*] – I don’t consider these blogs I write or my YouTube channel actual content creation because none of them are targeted for an audience to gain followers; they just exist for me to put stuff on.
