Making my life simpler

I've been on a journey to make my life simpler for years now. It started with hyper-depression minimalism in a small apartment in Austin, Texas, and a shallow dive into Thích Nhất Hạnh books about Buddhism. Eventually, though, I realized that my surroundings weren't nearly as mentally draining as what I was consuming. Over the last few years, I've gained a lot of discipline around how I interact with social media. It has not been easy. I don't keep social media apps on my phone, and on my computer they're highly regulated by an extension called Social Focus, which limits ads, suggested posts, notifications, Shorts, and all the other things designed to use my monkey brain against me. That was hard at first, but now it's normal. My only real social media now is YouTube, and even there I've become hyper-aware of when someone is trying to sell me a solution to a problem I don't have. Once you start noticing it, it's everywhere. Someone is always telling you that you need a new hobby, a new product, a new system, a new computer, a new way to organize your life, or a new problem to be worried about. I've also started distancing myself from group chats that aren't fostering a particularly healthy mental state. Recently, several friends left a group chat, and I think politics had something to do with it. Which is weird because myself and others who didn't leave are the ones who never talk about politics. The whole thing was strange to me because I increasingly feel like we're living in different worlds. They live in large cities where politics and cultural arguments seem to be constantly present. I'm fairly insulated from that in Mississippi, where things change slowly and most of these debates don't have much effect on my day-to-day life. I think it's easy, when you're surrounded by that stuff all the time, to start projecting political enemies onto people you actually know. It wasn't until I heard my dad complaining about something the president had said that week that I realized how disconnected I'd become from all of it. I had no idea what he was talking about. And I actually liked that. I don't really follow the news anymore because, for the most part, I can't do anything about it. There are things happening thousands of miles away that I could spend hours reading about, getting angry about and arguing about, and at the end of the day absolutely nothing in my actual life would be different. I don't want to spend my energy that way anymore. I've started doing the same thing with entertainment. I'm basically not playing new games anymore. I've reverted back to Game Boy games, the original Ocarina of Time, and Classic World of Warcraft. I've stopped using two monitors when I'm playing. I don't want a game on one screen and YouTube on another. I want to actually be immersed in what I'm doing. I want to play a game. I want to listen to an album. I want to do one thing at a time. Strangely, going backwards technologically has helped me do that. Playing older games has slowly and drastically reduced how much YouTube I watch. I'm not constantly looking for another thing to consume while I'm already consuming something else. And I think that's becoming the larger goal for me. Not really minimalism in the sense of owning as few things as possible. I still own plenty of crap. It's more about reducing the number of things competing for my attention. I don't want every empty moment filled. I don't want every interest turned into a shopping list. I don't want to know about every argument happening somewhere else. I don't need a second screen playing something while I'm doing something I supposedly enjoy.