I should worry less about missing One Amazing Thing, the feed FOMO. I can’t read the whole internet. Not even the small part I’ve carefully selected and loaded into my feed reader.
Newsblur has an option to expire feed items after some number of days. I’d previously disabled this, erroneously thinking I could at least read the part of the internet I have manually identified as interesting.
So, with some hesitation, I turned on expiring items, taking me from several thousand unread items to several hundred. This is a nice, but superficial, step forward. As a result, I’m reading feeds more frequently because there’s a less-scary top-line number. (Even when I had the number hidden, it was still scary.)
The good stuff, even if automatically expired, will probably find its way back to me. I’m likely to return to writers I enjoy and look through the archives anyway. Instead of feed FOMO, I should worry more about reading the bigger, guaranteed good things. There are books, essays, longer articles out there. Not to mention making my own stuff. Do more of that!
I wonder what other kinds of data would be improved with an expiration date. Not that all data should disappear. Backlog/task-shaped data seems the most likely to benefit from automatically deleting themselves. Unread emails, tasks, project work, read-it-later links, watch-list videos, that one season you never got around to watching on a streaming service you’re still paying for. If those archived themselves, or I archived them every few months, maybe that would make for checking off more of the good stuff!