Life As A Dashboard of Plugins and Add-ons
By: Michael Thorn
Tags: Choices, Lifestyle, Living, Plugins, Dashboard

The Art of Deactivating & Reactivating

Photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash

Take a moment to consider yourself the administrator of your life’s dashboard. Recently, the platform your existence is built on has had 90% of its functionality removed but you remain in control of what is left and you’ll stay in control when full functionality returns. You are admin, after all.

The other day a slider on the front page of my website stopped functioning. Or, more accurately, it disappeared. This occurred immediately after I had upgraded to the latest version of the WordPress platform. A similar thing had happened once before, so I knew the score. One of the plugins I was running was not yet compatible with the new version of WP and was causing the error. But which was it? There was only one way to find out.

I would have to deactivate all the plugins and bring them back in one at a time until I identified the culprit by a simple process of elimination.

As it happened, one third of the way through the process, and before the source of the error had revealed itself, I noticed that one of the plugins had become marked as needing an upgrade, so I interrupted my systematic detection, made a note of where I had got to in terms of moving down the plugins list one by one, and clicked on the upgrade button.

Now, with fingers crossed, I highlighted all the plugins and reactivated them with one click. Cool! The slider was working, with all the plugins active. I was running the latest version of WordPress and all was good with the world.

Of course, had I waited a day before jumping up to WordPress 5.6 this plugin would have auto-updated itself and there would have been no interruption to the slider. Sometimes an eagerness to adopt new processes increases exposure to risk.

Alternatively, it could very well have turned out that an entirely different plugin was causing the glitch and I would have had to deactivate all the plugins not previously checked and begun the elimination process over again.

In present circumstances, in order to defend ourselves and protect our health services against the pandemic, we have all been forced to deactivate a whole host of ‘plugins’ our previous lives depended upon.

For some, this has been a positive experience. They have discovered that a life founded on a simpler framework can be, at least in the short-term, perfectly fulfilling. People are buying more books, reading more, discovering the pleasure of a simple walk in the countryside.

For others, it has been anything but positive. It has shown them how much they miss the myriad pleasures, and even some of the minor irritations, that had been plugged in to their lives before the pandemic. A life without travel, without the close company of friends and wider family, without face-to-face workplace banter, without theatre-going, without gossip or flirtation, feels dreadfully diminished.

Access to immunisation holds out the promise of being able to return to the previous version of our lives some time in 2021.But will everyone wish to re-activate all those lifestyle plugins? Even if they do, will it be sensible to switch them all back on at once, or should they be reactivated incrementally to increase the chance of identifying plugins that may actually skew (or screw up) a part of life?

The cautious and risk-averse may wish to hold back from rebooting their old lives and wait to see how others fare. Or they may take the softly-softly route, bring things back into their lives one at a time and, by doing so, discover, Hey, I never knew how much of my anxiety was down to this one part of my life, so from now on I can do without that, thank you very much, but everything else I’ll have back at once, please.

Many will rush back into living their lives to the full again, and more. If something throws them off as a result, they will at least now know that they can — work requirements aside — retreat into a voluntary lockdown then switch things back on one at a time, reactivating them plug-in-like, until they identify the part of their life that requires a rethink or a hit-delete.

Thoreau said, “Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.” Will there be fewer fools around after the pandemic? Perhaps not, but I think it likely that there will be an increased realisation that this is the one life we have and that we are administrators of life’s dashboard, adding and taking away lifestyle plugins as we go.