Nothing Backed Up, Nothing Lost

Wednesday was a personal reset day. I shaved for the first time in what felt like weeks, cleaned the apartment, and then did something I’d been putting off for months: wiped my Mac mini completely and reinstalled the OS from scratch. No backups. Not a single file copied anywhere. First time I’d ever done it that way.

The absence of a safety net should have been nerve-wracking. Instead it felt like throwing open a window. Everything gone—all the accumulated junk, the half-finished projects, the duplicate downloads, the software I’d installed once and never touched again. Mac OS X fresh on the drive, the machine running exactly as fast as it did the day I unboxed it. Phenomenal, genuinely.

I also finally switched to a Logitech optical mouse with an actual scroll wheel that works, which is already changing my life in small, embarrassing ways. New programs installed, Safari as the only browser, and I found a small notification utility called Growl that handles system alerts elegantly. iTunes is completely empty now—every song deleted. I couldn’t listen to any of it anymore. Time for new material anyway.