bloatmaxxing my digital spaces
i'll admit it. i can't stop bloating my digital spaces. all of them. i hate bloatware, but i realize i'm so incredibly disorganized (both digitally and irl) that i just enshittify every space i take up with clutter, which grows and grows to the point of a bloated pit of despair. i enjoy having a tidy space, but i realize that my issue then becomes i'm never motivated enough to maintain a tidy space; like there's too much damage done and i just need a clean start.
i think that's why I like siloing all my works. each silo might be bloated but i can always just abandon the last piece and start clean. my issue then becomes all the huge, overgrown messes that require intervention to deal with, though i just don't have the time or the mental energy to deal with keeping things clean and tidy. it's always half-assed. honestly, the best examples of this are my 3 computers.
i have 3 computers: the PC in my childhood home, my PC i have where i am now, and my school/work laptop. both home PCs run windows 11 and my work laptop runs debian 13 w/ kde plasma. my desktop computers carry the legacy of bloat since the hard drive of my childhood home PC (home PC) was the same 1 TB SSD I was using since i upgraded my PC from my childhood optiplex 780 to an HP machine sometime around 2020-2021. that legacy kinda makes any file-sorting a monumental challenge, which i will tackle post-graduation. i built my home PC with my brother's help, but its such a nightmare.
my 2nd PC (let's call it my here PC) was a machine my brother built for me sometime before my junior year of college, where I needed to upgrade from a docked thinkpad t14 gen 1 to something beefier for CAD work. this computer got enshittified from OneDrive syncing all the slop from my home PC into my here PC. not a good start, but at least the downloads was clean! then i proceeded to roll in my own filth and my downloads basically became my "everything" folder and proceeded to bloat up with everything i dumped in there. my .stl files are exported to my downloads, so they're typically all in the same place but man does that make shit bad.
my work laptop is actually my 3rd work laptop. my first laptop was the aforementioned thinkpad t14 gen 1 that got so thoroughly filled with shit (downloads, bloatware, windows 10 planned obsolescence) that it ended up overheating so bad it became unusable. ok, fine, clean sheet. i got a 2nd t14 gen 1 running ubuntu, which was kept reasonably clean until the downloads folder exploded, and i was done w/ how much of a pain ubuntu was when it came to installing stuff thru the console. naturally, i got a 3rd thinkpad because my father keeps throwing surplus technology at me, and i proceeded to give myself another clean break from the last laptop, which i backed up and transferred the files (cleanly organized for once.) my downloads folder is still growing, but i will prune it occasionally and shuffle the files to their proper location when possible, as xournal++ (my primary note taking app) doesn't like having the source .pdf backgrounds shuffled around.
but herein lies the problem. i'm like this everywhere, all the time. i would like to keep a tidy digital (and irl) space, but the convenience of living in a slop-heap is too great. i just like putting things down in a semi-consistent fashion too much to organize. i'm a lot better now than i was as a kid, but man it sucks to live like this. i just don't know if i have it in me to keep a tidy space when i get busy or get caught in a mental downwards-spiral. i can keep a place temporarily clean but it's just so insurmountable i often need friends to help me get back on my feet.
i need to stop siloing my problems and just maintain my spaces instead of running away. there is no reassuring message to a present or future self here, it's just an "i would like X" statement. i'll try to give it a shot though.