Returning to simple, undifferentiated presence before optimization: stop customizing and personalizing your digital life to exhaustion.
The uncarved block (pu) represents original wholeness before artificial division and complexity. Modern digital life invites endless customization: curated feeds, filtered followers, optimized notifications. This constant carving—choosing, filtering, personalizing—fractures attention and increases decision fatigue. Each customization feels like control but creates new demands for maintenance. Laozi valued the uncarved block's simplicity and natural virtue. Applied to digital anxiety, this means resisting the tyranny of personalization. Rather than obsessing over your feeds' perfect composition, you might use a single simple news source, accept the raw social media experience, or disable algorithmic recommendations. This seems counterintuitive: shouldn't customization reduce overwhelm? Yet each preference requires monitoring and adjustment. The uncarved block approach acknowledges that perfect personalization is impossible and exhausting. By accepting imperfect, simple, unpersonalized digital spaces, you reduce the burden of maintenance and recover the peace of accepting what is rather than constantly sculpting what should be.
Peri can explain this concept, give practical examples, help you decide whether it applies to your situation, or recommend a journey if appropriate.
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