More Mobile? (Premium)

With an eye on a more mobile future, I’ve been experimenting with alternative PC setups for both productivity and entertainment. This includes laptops and external displays, which may seem contradictory. But this isn’t additive: though I understand the appeal, I am infamously uninterested in multi-display setups. Instead, I’m curious about how using portable displays can enable me and my wife to keep doing what we do in a future that will likely be quite different from today.

And I guess we should start there. For those unaware of our plans, my wife and I are currently undergoing a lengthy and aggressive decluttering process this year in anticipation of selling our house and downsizing, perhaps as soon as early 2022. (The exact schedule is fluid and is based in part on our kids’ schedules and plans.)

We’re no strangers to the process: we did some form of cleaning and decluttering each summer for over 15 years because of our annual home swaps. But thanks to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and with the kids now in and/or out of college, we haven’t swapped homes since 2019. And whether or when we can do so again is unclear. Regardless, I assume it’s understandable that this last terrible year and a half has triggered a lot of rethinking on our parts, as I’m sure it has for many of you. And in our case, part of that rethinking includes accelerating our long-time (but to date, vague) plans to be more mobile in the future, and not be tied to just a single place.

What form that new mobility takes is also unclear, for now. We’ve often thought about it in terms of splitting the year between two places, with one of them ideally being an international location. Among other things, we want to minimize our exposure to the awful winters that we’ve experienced in the northeast United States for most of our lives. A series of snowstorms that left 6 feet of snow on the ground in early 2015 triggered our first desire to move; we had to replace our house’s roof and all of its windows as a result of snow and water damage. But after moving to Pennsylvania in 2017, we had the most horrific winter driving experience of our lives, and very easily could have died as result. We’re not staying here either.

But we also want to be there for our kids as needed and have access to our friends and family too. And it has to make sense financially. When you start to add up all the factors, you can see why people freeze up and stay put. If this was easy, we’d already be doing it.

Anyway. How that all happens is a story for another day. For now, just know that we are decluttering to a level we’ve never done before, and that even if we end up staying in this too-large home for a few more years, it will be as spartan and nearly empty as is possible. I’ve already given away/donated, sold, or recycled a metric ton of electronics and other hardware as part of this effort, but I’ve got more to go. And as we make more and more progress, ...

Gain unlimited access to Premium articles.

With technology shaping our everyday lives, how could we not dig deeper?

Thurrott Premium delivers an honest and thorough perspective about the technologies we use and rely on everyday. Discover deeper content as a Premium member.

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC