Cards you’re ambivalent about are worse than cards that you hate. Cards you hate get acted on instantly, but the ones you’re ambivalent about are allowed to accumulate until they outnumber the ones you love, and then the whole language, your whole life just becomes one big “meh”. So recast ambivalence as hate. If in doubt, throw it out. Delete that card.
Don’t let the cancer of ambivalence overrun your language experience.
Yesterday, I bought like ten books. Pretty much a daily occurrence for me lately. But I also threw away like 3, two of which were from the new ten. They sucked and they weren’t gonna get better and it would literally cost me more to sell them than to bin them. This is Japan; that’s how things work here.
At the time, I felt guilty about it all. The books in question had even gotten good reviews from people I trust. But they simply weren’t a good fit for me. No blood, no foul.
Now I feel free.
Freak thyself not to the out, though: I’m not asking you to start throwing books away; you’re prolly not there yet; you’re probably around places that take book donations. For better or worse (mostly for better), we have enormous cultural resistance to simply discarding books, and I would just as soon see things stay that way.
Paradoxically, my library is happier now; I am happier now. Because subtraction adds value: removing things that are a “meh” makes everything better — it raises the level of all that remains. Few people in our time understood this better than the Syrian hippie who made the mobile phone that you and all your friends use. If in doubt, look to his example.
Ambivalence is like cigarette smoke. It gets everywhere, on everything. I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life (those unignited Q-Tips in the QRG movie aren’t cigarettes ), but people know for days when I’ve “been out” with smokers. The smell gets everywhere.
Don’t let ambivalence get (stay) on you and your stuff. Ambivalence is hate by another name. And deletion is just another form of rep. Delete those SRS cards with extreme prejudice.