My Efforts at Implementing “Digital Minimalism”
I recently finished Cal Newport’s phenomenal new book which came out last year called Digital Minimalism. The man has a PhD and he’s an associate professor in computer science, so by merit of credentials alone he knows what he’s talking about.
In the book, Newport accurately raises to hell the insidious bastardization of our attention, our intelligence as human beings and the things we value the most by our “secret”, sniveling overlords in Silicon Valley that run companies like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Newport isn’t against using social media, or engaging with these new “smart” devices that have become ubiquitous in this century. Newport does though give ample evidence to suggest (and prove) that the way we interact with technology now is not productive or helpful for our self-esteem in the slightest.
It isn’t our fault to an extent, but only because most people haven’t acknowledged how these tech conglomerates have developed sharp, multi-layered and complex metrics, algorithms and systems to steal the most two intangible qualities you’ll ever own: your attention and your time.
Early on in the book, Newport mentions a speech given by Bill Maher in 2017 on an episode of his HBO show Real Time. The excerpt that Newport includes has Maher firing off this rousing analogy:
“The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit that they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because let’s face it, checking your likes is the new smoking.”
Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, every tech mogul of their ilk; they are all tobacco farmers selling the masses an addiction, an addiction they don’t indulge on in excess themselves.
They’re taking cues from Benjamin Day, the unofficial founder of the “attention economy” back in the 19th century, where he ran the New York Sun, the first “penny press” newspaper. To Newport’s depiction, Day came to the realization on how to reverse engineer the process of turning foot traffic into sales and revenue; by re-selling his readers’ attention and investment in his newspaper’s product to third-party advertisers, who also wanted their hard-earned money.
I’m definitely not the only person who wonders where the time goes, when they’re lying in bed, or pacing around their own home with their headphones attached to them like a leash, and their phone stuck with them like a dog.
My attention, like everyone else’s has become a commodity that puts money in other people’s pockets. They don’t put the T.V. in front of us; we chose to buy it voluntarily.
Fom an article on MarketWatch in 2018, the average U.S. adult spends just under four hours on any kind of mobile device, with most of that time (62%) being spent browsing apps and the Internet on their phones.
Another article, which got data from millennials and baby boomers reports that the average American adult is spending 5.4 hours per day. In any other metric measured, obviously millennials were shown to be outdoing baby boomers due to the higher exposure they have with newer digital technologies.
On top of this, people are still engaging with more older forms of media like television at astronomical rates as well. People invest and arguably waste so much of their daily lives today logged in, and “connected” to the online world.
As Newport highlights in his book, this is counter-intuitive to our nature as “humans are not wired to be constantly wired.” It’s damaging for us, psychologically and physically and endless studies can back up that.
In the age where avoiding “FOMO” has become a heightened primal concern, people feel obligated to stay logged into social media, and roundabout 24/7 news coverage to ensure that they are up-to-date with anything and everything important that’s going. They want to constantly know what their friends are doing, and if their peers are living more interesting lives than them.
Cal Newport in the first half of Digital Minimalism calls out how social media messes up our neurological functioning, playing with our levels of “dopamine”, the hormone that’s intrinsic to our body’s reward system.
Every time we use social media or scroll through our phones without any direct purpose in mind, Newport hits the hammer right on the nail by saying that all we’re doing is chasing more “convenient hits of distraction”.
As Newport writes convincingly of, many people have forgotten the ability to live structured lives, propelled by a vivid sense of “intentional living” that consist of meaningful work and in contrast, “virtuous hobbies” (a term coined termed by the wife of Pete Adeney, catalyst of the FI 2.0 movement.)
In replacement of that, boredom boils and sizzles, and a profound directionlessness absorbs people’s psyche. In turn, people cope with these artificial deficiencies by engaging with their smart devices, the same way smokers inhale the nicotine tobacco farmers cultivate and alcoholics finish bottle after bottle. They consume it like fast food; it’s “empty calories” entertainment to them.
In the majority of their spare time, people use smart devices to seemingly no end. But they feel empty, confused and miserable because the non-stop usage of social media doesn’t really offer and fulfill one of their basic biological needs: the need for community.
Communication by way of these devices has transformed into a substitute, not a supplement or alternative for conversation and genuine connection.
It’s truly amazing that we have video-sharing apps like Zoom, Google Hangouts and FaceTime that allow us to stay in touch with our friends, relatives, etc. from the comfort of our homes or wherever we’re at.
But it’s not a mightily disputable idea that long-distance relationships in a romantic context just tend to on average not work out. We know why that is. For as much as it is tried, you cannot replace the proximity aspect when it comes being with your partner or significant other in the fresh, side-by-side.
So why is it then that we’ve convinced ourselves that long-distance forms of communication, outside of practicality, business/work purposes or sheer necessity, these forms of communication will satisfy our desire to be close to the ones we love?
On that note, I want to talk about how I’ve started to slowly but surely incorporated the bigger-picture life overhaul that Cal Newport emphatically recommends in Digital Minimalism.
The three principal tenets of “digital minimalism”, detailed by Newport are as follows:
- Clutter is costly
- Optimization is important
- Intentionality is satisfying
To summarize what these three tenets entail in short -
- Less is more when it comes to the amount of activities, apps on the smartphone you use and the amount of time you spent on the Internet.
- Every piece of technology you use should have a tangible purpose and use in mind.
- When you use specific technologies, you should always be conscious and aware of the mental and physical impact they have on you, and whether you’re interacting with technology for the greater good or not.
Digital minimalism is a doctrine who’s main objective is to allow people to utilize technologies that are the most important to an individual, but also align with their most deeply-held values. It’s a philosophy that can help people to develop discipline in relation to this technocratic world growing around all of us.
As I’m trying to get accustomed to, a vital aspect of maximizing the most out of digital minimalism is to understand that you need to de-program yourself on the current set of beliefs you’ve cultivated about social media and technology.
“FOMO” is a natural feeling to have, but one like all others that flies by like the wind. You cannot be ruled and bound to those feelings.
It’s the not the end of the world to not be able to reach the end of your feed (it’s an endless cycle; it’s literally impossible to do so.) It’s alright to miss out on events and stories that do not directly pertain to you. It’s alright to miss out on things altogether.
HACK #1: BLOCK OUT TIME FOR SOLITUDE
It’s not selfish. We all need time to take care of ourselves, mentally, physically, spiritually, etc. As the saying goes, you can’t take of others if you haven’t put in the effort to take care of yourself and your needs and wants.
Humans are innately social creatures, who thrive upon belonging to larger groups, ideas and structures. Newport is not mute when it comes to reminding readers of that. That instinct cannot be “un-wired” out of us. Nonetheless, life is at it’s best when balance and moderation are in the mix.
Our bodies need time and space away from other human beings, but so do our minds. If we cannot get or make time for this, eventually, we will start experiencing a condition Newport describes as “solitude deprivation”.
Solitude deprivation as explained in the book is a state in which people spend no time with their own thoughts, free and uninhibited from other people’s input.
Over time in society, due to how ever-advancing mass-scale, mass-produced technology has become, and how the distribution of information has evolved, we are bombarded with messages and offers and advertisements and colorful designs, displays and arrangements, whether on the Internet or in real life.
It leads to sensory overload. We may not acknowledge it immediately, but after a while, our minds are analogous to computers, and our software is going to crash.
HOW I’M IMPLEMENTING THIS:
Newport includes the real-life example of famous but obscure American philosopher Henry David Thoreau, who built a cabin at Walden Pond within the outskirts of his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. He chronicles his experiences in his by default “magnum opus” Walden.
In reflection, Thoreau came to the realization that he valued the pleasantries, family and close comrades that made up a sizable portion of his life as much as he did isolation from the world at large. He could observe “the slow rhythms of nature”, get drawn in to them, get lost through them, and still be in touch who he was at the core.
It’s eye-opening putting that into context with how his cabin was not far off from a public road, and Concord was only a half-hour walk from his cabin. Friends and family according to the book visited him frequently.
This hack is more about distancing yourself to a healthy and sensible degree from all aspects of our up-and-down, everyday lives and not specifically just technology (it’s how I interpreted this section of Newport’s book.)
I’m an only child, so being isolated and separated from others kind of comes to natural. But in the age of social media, growing up, I developed when I was younger chronic anxiety and draining insecurity from using apps like Instagram and Snapchat, which made me feel pathetic, worthless and inadequate to my peers. I would constantly watch them going to parties, doing this and that, and wondering if I would ever measure up.
Realizing now that many people that post their lives on social media are more unhappy and insecure than I am (they’re really are just posting “highlights”), my self-esteem has improved and the depression and nihilism I was plagued with has gone down.
These devices we use are portals to other worlds and mirrors to the respective lives we are living. I’m not suggesting you have to smash the mirror, smash the portal and do away from them, but I’ve started to find time in my day, at least a sliver, to be at peace beyond their mild intrusion.
I set aside time in the morning and at night before I go to bed to meditate in quiet, and synchronize my breathing and my thoughts. I’m going to eventually go a step further, and block out time in the middle of the day to not interact with any digital technology whatsoever.
In total, make this routine in your day at the bare minimum 30 minutes to an hour long if you want to implement this hack.
The goal is as to historian W. Barksdale Maynard expounds about Thoreau, to find “a wilderness in a suburban setting”, and not to get swept up in the vines of a murky, swampy jungle.
If you stay committed to it, and be consistent, just like the rest of these hacks, it won’t feel like a hack at all.
HACK #2: STOP CLICKING THE “LIKE BUTTON
It goes beyond just that. It does help. A epiphany has hit me how I wasn’t really engaging intently when I was on social media, browsing through people’s stories and swiping down to refresh my feed. The interactions I have with friends is relegated to commenting on their photos and me or them replying to each other’s stories.
Cal Newport references Sherry Turkle, a researcher who’s done extensive research on technology’s impact on the human condition.To borrow a phrase she’s used, social media has allowed “nuanced conversation” to shift into “ambiguous connection”.
Everybody who struggles with a social media addiction needs to start prioritizing higher-quality conversation.
HOW I’M IMPLEMENTING THIS:
Doing my small, little part, I’ve chosen to stop liking empty and vacuous selfies a lot of the girls I follow take, and spice up with pitch-perfect lighting and snazzy filters. I see through the surface of what’s presented, so I can tell that they took this selfie out of vanity, insecurity, brazen narcissism or intense boredom.
Me liking their photos is implicitly encouraging their toxic behavior. You and me both encourage people’s worst tendencies and ugly traits when we tap the like button.
Newport goes into the history of how Facebook developed the “Like” button in the last decade as a efficient means to aggregate similar comments users would make on their friends and loved ones’ posts.
He classifies the “Like” button as a form of “nontrivial communication” that’s basically trivial. I’ve never even thought about it that much until reading this book, but the “Like” button in a way is quite vague and nondescript in terms of what it indicates.
I say that because everyone at some point or another has liked a photo or video that didn’t approve of, or thought was visually unappealing or boring. We do it impulsively to remain in good faith with our peers, or to feed into a seething insecurity that’s whispering in our ear, or because we’re scrolling through our feeds mindlessly on autopilot, liking everything we see.
The aim of this hack overall is to adjust and refine how you go about communicating, and more critically staying connected with the people that matter most to us.
Whether it’s only viewing certain content on certain apps, or only interacting with our friends over one texting app or through FaceTime, attempt in some organized way to concentrate your interactions into a focused “funnel”.
You can hack the system these companies in Silicon Valley have in place at the epicenter of the highly lucrative attention economy, and instill meaning and purpose back into what you use social media for, and the connections you build doing so.
Strive to achieve “conversation-centric communication” as Newport puts it; a best of both worlds.
HACK #3: EMBRACE SLOW MEDIA
As of the early 2000s, the average human attention span is around 7–8 seconds. That’s flat-out bad. And our end-to-end usage of smartphones, laptops, tablets, etc. is just worsening our capability to be present of every moment of our lives, and to focus with immense clarity.
It doesn’t help that we don’t organize the way we consume content online. We just take everything that’s thrown at us, and swallow it figuratively without even chewing thoroughly.
Newport throws out several tweaks that can be made to fix this. The bulk of the advice for this is rooted in the idea of crafting a “low-information diet”; courtesy must be given to Tim Ferris, the author of the highly acclaimed bestseller The 4–Hour Workweek for that expression.
For one, if you’re reading the news, only get facts and opinions from the highest-quality sources you can find or follow.
This is subjective based upon one’s personal political beliefs and worldview. To one person, a high-quality source is CNN. To another, it’s Fox News, or the Drudge Report. To somebody else, it’s either the New York Times or the Hill.
Regardless, this narrows your attention and feed to a select amount of content that doesn’t take hours to get through reading. It’s imperative to keep in mind, as Newport declares that a small amount of high-quality offerings is more advantageous than a larger quantity of low-quality fare.
In addition, Newport shovels out the advice to have one specific format for which you consume whatever content you’re looking at (doesn’t just have to be the news). This eliminates the racing thoughts that occur when you are presented with a buffet line of content to choose from. You don’t feel overwhelmed, and scrolling through a feed carries more weight than usual.
To top things off, try to as Newport says, have a specific location or multiple specific locations for consuming content. Interacting with technology and social can feel hap-hazardous and random because we don’t install rigid parameters that guide that experience.
HOW I’M IMPLEMENTING THIS:
The whole “have one place for engaging with any kind of technological device” tactic is for obvious reasons if you’re caught up on global news not practical for my everyday situation right now, but in the future, I definitely hope to try it out.
For right now, I’m definitely going to start unfollowing people on all my social media accounts that I’m not friends with or post anything interesting or of tangible substance to me.
I’m also to exercise some mental willpower and limit how many times I refresh my feed and how many stories I look at in any consideration.
I am watching CNN on most days, and reading the occasional article from the New York Times, but overall with the Coronavirus, or COVID-19 epidemic shutting down the global economy and keeping everyone locked in their homes practicing “social distancing”, mounting up hysteria and fragile angst, I’m pretty confident that there’s no more perfect time than now to be careful in how I take the news in.
HACK #4: ENGAGE IN HIGH-QUALITY LEISURE
This last hack is arguably the most essential one, one that everyone and their cousins should be working on.
Most people have jobs, whether a “9-to-5”, a business they run or even freelance work in the booming gig economy that constitutes the majority of what they spend their time on in an average day. But on a day that’s not average, we all, including myself have a surplus of free time to do whatever we want, minus other direct responsibilities like kids to take care of.
In the chapter “Reclaim Leisure”, Cal Newport wants to do exactly as the title of the chapter proclaims because the part of our lives that don’t include work or school usually is not as structured and formatted as we would want it to be.
Newport gives us a sagacious blueprint to convert all of the hours in the day we have to ourselves into purposeful activity and action. He mentions the Bennett principle, which to summarize is the concept devised by a British man named Arnold Bennett that believes that humans should attempt to engage in leisure and fun that’s just as rigorous and intensive as their actual jobs that give them a living.
Bennett notices that in London, the average middle-class, white-collar worker would in their downtime get involved in “frivolous, time-killing pastimes.” They’d spend eight hours on the job, but the other sixteen doing nothing wholesome or of substance.
Newport instructs to avoid this trap like the plague. As he frames it, if we invest more active energy into a task, we will obtain more fruitful value while doing it.
Yes, we crave structure and routine, and in general we’re not well-adapted to manage efficiently in times of chaos and disorder. But the intoxicating pull of an app like Instagram, Twitter or YouTube that offers an infinite amount of options and entertainment to be distracted by fills the void in time up quite easily.
They’re like informal candy stores or an informal FootLocker, where you can get or try anything you want, and splurge from all selections presented and found. It’s a bottomless pit to drain from, but in the process, instead it ends up draining all of us of our willpower.
It’s an addiction that numbs us, inside and out. We don’t know what else to do, even if we do and that’s just what we tell ourselves to ignore the “drug” that has stammering control over us. If we go through withdrawal, we might crash. Down the road of that leads to a dead end known as anxiety and depression.
So to circumnavigate that, Newport shows multiple routes that can bring us closer to fostering “high-value behaviors”.
He brings up examples of people he’s known and met to highlight how people need to put the two hands they were born with to greater use.
In this society we live in, full of disposable and replaceable items and consumer goods, people don’t know how to cherish their possessions, and be connected to their immediate surroundings.
Consumer items can be bought again, but the larger point at hand is that we have to get in the habit of creating more and consuming less. Exercising in hands-on craft makes us human, in Newport’s words.
Find a hobby that you like to do, and make time for it every day you can. If those hobbies don’t interest you currently or are too taxing, find a new one. Learn about a skill, like fixing cars, repairing your house, sculpting a sculpture or even making collages that fuses the utility of your hands with the utility of your brain; as long as it’s something that requires a little elbow grease and exertion of good ole’ blood, sweat and tears (“We used to learn to think with our hands, not the other way around.”)
Besides that, a term Newport conceives of is “supercharged socializing”. To break that down, many of the activities and hobbies we hold is in due part because we participate in them with our friends and our loved ones. They reward us with an enriching sense of fraternity, sorority, community, etc.
We sometimes don’t even like the activity/hobby. But we’ll keep doing continue it just not to lose those iron bonds we’ve built. Find hobbies and activities that put you in social situations, uncomfortable or not, allowing you to sustain old connections or build new ones.
It can be a Crossfit boot camp, a sport, a coffee shop that allows visitors to play board games or a philosophy club like the iconic Benjamin Franklin established, as per examples propounded upon in the book. It can be anything of the sorts.
HOW I’M IMPLEMENTING THIS:
With most states in America and the vast majority of countries worldwide imposing mild to strict quarantine measures due to the breakout of COVID-19 that presumably could last for months on end as of now, the extent to which I, or any of you can incorporate this hack (of any of the other three) is extraordinarily limited.
However, even in times of mayhem and a cataclysmic paradigm shift like this, small baby steps can be taken.
I’m continuing the habit of reading books on a consistent basis that I’ve just recently re-discovered. On top of that, I’ve started a mini daily routine of making sure I make time to journal my thoughts and feelings down on paper and meditate in a quiet space by myself.
I do write affirmations, but I do view them as phony and inauthentic as they come across to me as “feel-good” trite that people subscribe to compensate for a lack of results and success.
To stay in shape and move the gears of my body, I have been mostly consistent when it comes to doing bodyweight exercises and exercises with a 30 pound dumbbell in my small, cramped, flat-rate box of an apartment. I’ve been grinding out hammer curls, overhead tricep extensions, standing shoulder press, and more.
Finally, I’m thankful that I had the coincidental foresight to save the blue binder I had that contained all of my cluttered and dis-shelved notes that I had from the two years in high school when I took IB Spanish. Learning a language or two has been a high-priority goal of mine for when I was older (why the public education curriculum in the U.S. doesn’t mandate kids being proficient and competent in a foreign language goes above my head like a weightless balloon.)
Free, un-taxed time like this only comes around in the dog days of one’s youth. I’m not old, but I will definitely not get free time like this probably ever again. So this truly is the time to start developing some serious habits and “high-value behaviors”, as Newport accentuates.
Things like the IPhone, the IPad, computers, smart-watches, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Tinder, Netflix, AI (which is inevitably coming) are not going away anytime soon. They have been our near past, they are our present, and they will be the near and debatable distant future.
Towards the end of Digital Minimalism, Newport asserts that smart devices and modern digital technology give people an artificial refuge from the plainness of their existence. It’s a safety net that creates a barrier from what they’re not willing to address.
It’s difficult and oxymoronic to try to “dumb down” your smartphone; it’s like trying to lose IQ points by drinking the spuriously-titled Smart Water. But the attempt to take upon such an goal will give you the strength to achieve more freedom from your modern vices.
Implementing these aforementioned four hacks and every other benchmark that’s a staple of digital minimalism is not guaranteed to cure you of your virulent bondage to the devices around you.
It’s a solid diving board to start off from. The devices we use should not become parasites that waste our time and steal our attention away from our jobs, the interactions with our friends and family, our hobbies/leisure, all the little precious minutes and seconds in between and throughout.
They should be cooperative complements to all of those things. If not, you need, as I have begun to, seriously consider whether you need a detox from, or to eliminate any and all usage and interaction with them from your life.
There’s always going to be a new trending post on this or that social media app. There will always be games to play on your phone. There will be a breaking news article with a click-baiting headline.
You’ve got to generate the drive to push past the fog, and capture the tranquil, fresh air that awaits you on the other side.
You’ve got to jump into the void, with or without a parachute (a saying my mom harps on a lot.) I’m jumping into the void as well.
It’s time to be a rebel in a brave new world. It’s time to give digital minimalism, or an intermediate version of it a chance.
I am Justin Cole Adams. I’m from New York City. I’m not a spectacular writer, but I write with grit, honesty, a keen eye for the truth hiding in between the lines.
Here’s the link to all other articles and stories I have written so far.
Godspeed everyone and take care. Stay safe, stay sound, stay confined in the comforts of your own home and practice social distancing to your discretion. Wash your hands, cover your mouths and don’t cough on anyone that doesn’t deserve it.
2020 was supposed to be everyone’s year to shine. That may not be the case anymore, but all that matters is that we make it through this rocky tide. A recession and possible earth-shattering economic depression is imminent.
Regardless, the best of us will it make through this. We will, and maybe then 2021 will be our year for sure.
