Digital Minimalism - Chapters 3 and 4

In which I reflect on digital detoxes, solitude, and the weird guilt I feel when I don’t follow the instructions in a self-help book exactly.

Yesterday, I continued listening to more of Cal Newport’s “Digital Minimalism”. Specifically, I listened to all of Chapter 3 (where Newport describes his recommended approach to doing a “digital declutter”) and the first third or so of Chapter 4 (where Newport describes the benefits of solitude).

Reactions to The Digital Declutter

Newport suggests starting your new digitally minimal life with a 30 day digital declutter where you completely eliminate optional technologies from your life. After the 30 days, you will then begin the process of reintroducing these technologies to your life. The main purpose of this seems to be to twofold:

1. It gives you more clarity in exactly what value the technology brings to the table. This can be hard to do when you’re under the spell of a digital addiction.
2. It gives you free time to rediscover any hobbies and values that have been lost in the midst of your mindless scrolling.

I don’t think either of these is necessary for me personally. I feel like I am currently capable of objectively evaluating the value of each technology I use in my life. This was not true before listening to Chapters 1 and 2 of Newport’s book; I previously had a pretty broad view of “value”. But those chapters already hammered in the idea of excluding technologies that aren’t tied to deep personal values, and also excluding those that may support your personal values, but are not the best way to achieve that value. For example, I mostly eliminated social media (instagram, facebook, etc.) from my life years ago, but had two final holdouts: reddit and youtube. Both, in my mind, were providing me with an immensely valuable information stream that seemed counterproductive to cut form my life – product reviews, how-to information, a variety of opinions on current events, productivity tips, etc. However, after listening to the beginning of Newport’s book, I immediately completely blocked both reddit and youtube from both my phone and computer. Much of the information I was receiving was only bringing me minor benefits rather than supporting a deep personal value, and the little bits that did support a deep personal value were not the best source of that value, especially given the major drawback of my addiction to checking reddit for new interesting takes and watching shorts ¹.

On finding hobbies I value, I already have a pretty substantial list. I’m running a D&D game that I find myself chronically behind on prep work for. This blog has been completely neglected for the last six or more months. I’ve been meaning to learn how to produce electronic music for the last several years, but never made it past the beginning of any course I started. I want to learn to create video games. I want to read fiction the way I did when I was a kid. I want to learn to draw. I want to host more gatherings at my house. The list goes on and on. I have no shortage of ideas of how to spend my time, it’s just a matter of actually doing them instead of picking the easy entertainment route.

So with all that being said, I’m probably going to skip Newport’s digital detox step and go straight to the part where I list out digital technologies in my life and clarify which ones I’m allowed to use and what my operating procedures for them are.

An interesting aspect to this decision is that I feel weirdly guilty about not doing the detox. The rational part of my brain knows that it’s my life and there’s nothing wrong with taking the one size fits all advice presented in a book, reflecting on it, and then adapting it to fit my own personal situation. Plus, if I find my adapted approach doesn’t work, I can always go back and do it Newport’s way. But there’s a little voice inside my head that is screaming: “You’re not doing it right. He’s the expert. It’s not going to work if you don’t do it exactly like he says. You’re rationalizing and making excuses to not do something hard.” That last sentence, especially, seems to be the main source of my guilt and anxiety. Can I trust my assessment that this is not particularly useful for me, and that doing it would be an unnecessary step standing between me and the part of the process that I’m really excited to jump into? Or have I just decided that I don’t want to do it because it might be hard, and now I’m just making up reasons to justify my laziness?

Reactions to Benefits of Solitude

I have not yet fully finished this chapter yet, but what I have listened to so far covers the benefits of being alone with your thoughts. A good chunk of the chapter, or at least the portion I finished, is spent discussing Lincoln and how he frequently lived away from the White House so that he would have some time to just think, since people were constantly vying for his attention while he was at the white house. Newport also pulls in other sources who elaborate on how important it is to sometimes shut out inputs from other people and reflect alone so that you can better understand the outside world plus your own personal state of being. It’s pretty clear that he’s leading up to a point about how our devices are keeping us constantly connected to a stream of inputs from others and completely eliminating solitude from our lives, although I haven’t quite gotten there yet.

This hit me as something that I could use more of. Just hours before listening to this chapter, I had spent a large part of the day cleaning the house. Housecleaning should be the perfect time to get in a bit of solitude. Yet I spent the whole day jamming out to music. And while I love music and singing, I definitely do not have any space to think while listening to it because my whole brain is singing along ². After house cleaning, I then went straight to the gym and filled my head with an audiobook during the entire workout. There were definitely useful ideas that I’m glad I heard in the book (it’s what inspired this post after all!), but that’s a second activity that could have fostered solitude and reflection, yet was instead filled with noise to prevent boredom ³. I definitely don’t want to completely eliminate music, podcast, and audiobooks from my life, but I should probably scale it back a little bit and make sure I also take quiet time sometimes to reflect and process information.

This realization has spawned a new goal for me: Any time I consume any sort of media, I will spend some time in quiet reflection and write a journal entry about it. Some of these may end up on my blog, but I will write them assuming they will be private for myself and only considering publishing the useful, not too deeply personal parts afterwards. Some reasonable exceptions apply: I don’t need to write a journal entry after doing a video workout, for example – fitting in workout time is already a win, and I don’t need to add another time consuming step that I must do on top of it. I also don’t need to reflect every time I listen to music, at least for now. I may change this later. I think being more reflective about my listening habits would be good for me, but I think it would be too disruptive to mandate this for the time being.