Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

by Cal Newport

Pulling together these pieces, here’s a summary of

minimalist screening process. The Minimalist Technology Screen To allow an optional technology back into your life at the end of the digital declutter, it must: Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough). Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it’s not, replace it with something better). Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it.

An electrical engineer named De, for example, was surprised to discover during his digital declutter how addicted he had become to checking news online, and how anxious it was making him—especially politically charged articles.

When the declutter concluded, he recognized that a complete news blackout was not sustainable but also recognized that subscribing to dozens of email newsletters and compulsively checking breaking news sites was not the best way to satisfy his need to be informed. He now checks AllSides.com once a day—a news site that covers the top stories, but for each story it neutrally links to three articles: one from a source associated with the political left, one from the right, and one from the center. This format has a way of defusing the aura of emotional charge that permeates a lot of our current political coverage, allowing De to stay up to speed without the spike in anxiety. Kate solved this same problem by replacing reading news with listening to a news roundup podcast each morning—keeping her informed without providing her the opportunity to mindlessly browse.

Perhaps predictably, many of the participants in my mass declutter experiment ended up abandoning the social media services that used to take up so much of their time. These services have a way of entering your life through cultural pressure and vague value propositions, so they tend not to hold up well when subjected to the rigor of the screen described above. It was also common, however, for participants to reintroduce social media in a limited manner to serve specific purposes. In these cases, they were often quite rigorous in taming the services with strict operating procedures.

Your monthlong break from optional technologies resets your digital life. You can now rebuild it from scratch in a much more intentional and minimalist manner. To do so, apply a three-step technology screen to each optional technology you’re thinking about reintroducing. This process will help you cultivate a digital life in which new technologies serve your deeply held values as opposed to subverting them without your permission. It is in this careful reintroduction that you make the intentional decisions that will define you as a digital minimalist.

A growing amount of research suggests that the time and space for quiet reflection the cottage enabled may have played a key role in helping Lincoln make sense of the traumas of the Civil War and tackle the hard decisions he faced. It was this idea, that something as simple as silence might have shaped our country’s history, that brought me to Lincoln’s cottage that fall afternoon to find out more.

The president would also famously record his ideas on scraps of paper that he would sometimes store in the lining of his top hat as he wandered the grounds.

Lincoln’s time alone with his thoughts played a crucial role in his ability to navigate a demanding wartime presidency. We can therefore say, with only mild hyperbole, that in a certain sense, solitude helped save the nation.

Everyone benefits from regular doses of solitude,

Kethledge, it turned out, relies on long periods alone with his thoughts to write his famously sharp legal opinions, often working at a simple pine desk in a barely renovated barn with no internet connection. “I get an extra 20 IQ points from being in that office,” he explains. Erwin, for his part, used long runs alongside the cornfields of Michigan to work through the difficult emotions he faced on first returning from combat, joking that “running is cheaper than therapy.” Soon after their initial meeting, Kethledge and Erwin decided to co-write a book on the topic of solitude. It took them seven years, but their efforts culminated in the 2017 release of Lead Yourself First

solitude is about what’s happening in your brain, not the environment around you. Accordingly, they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.

On the other hand, solitude can be banished in even the quietest setting if you allow input from other minds to intrude. In addition to direct conversation with another person, these inputs can also take the form of reading a book, listening to a podcast, watching TV, or performing just about any activity that might draw your attention to a smartphone screen. Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences—wherever you happen to be. Why is solitude valuable? Kethledge and Erwin detail many benefits, most of which concern the insight and emotional balance that comes from unhurried self-reflection.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” Blaise Pascal famously wrote in the late seventeenth century. Half a century later, and an ocean away, Benjamin Franklin took up the subject in his journal: “I have read abundance of fine things on the subject of solitude. . . . I acknowledge solitude an agreeable refreshment to a busy mind.”

Anthony Storr helped correct this omission with his seminal book, Solitude: A Return to the Self. As Storr noted, by the 1980s, psychoanalysis had become obsessed with the importance of intimate personal relationships, identifying them as the most important source of human happiness. But Storr’s study of history didn’t seem to support this hypothesis. He opens his 1988 book with the following quote from Edward Gibbon: “Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.” He then boldly writes: “Gibbon is surely right.”

Storr’s conclusion is that we’re wrong to consider intimate interaction as the sine qua non of human thriving. Solitude can be just as important for both happiness and productivity.

As Virginia Woolf argued in her 1929 feminist manifesto, A Room of One’s Own, this imbalance should not come as a surprise. Woolf would agree with Storr that solitude is a prerequisite for original and creative thought, but she would then add that women had been systematically denied both the literal and figurative room of their own in which to cultivate this state. To Woolf, in other words, solitude is not a pleasant diversion, but instead a form of liberation from the cognitive oppression that results in its absence. In Woolf’s time, women were denied this liberation by a patriarchal society. In our time, this oppression is increasingly self-inflicted by our preference for the distraction of the digital screen. This is the theme taken up by a Canadian social critic named Michael Harris in his 2017 book, also titled Solitude. Harris is concerned that new technologies help create a culture that undermines time alone with your thoughts, noting that “it matters enormously when that resource is under attack.” His survey of the relevant literature then points to three crucial benefits provided by solitude: “new ideas; an understanding of the self; and closeness to others.”

Harris argues, perhaps counterintuitively, that “the ability to be alone . . . is anything but a rejection of close bonds,” and can instead affirm them.

The poet and essayist May Sarton explored the strangeness of this point in a 1972 diary entry, writing: I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone

Wendell Berry summarized this point more succinctly when he wrote: “We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness.”

Examples similar to those given above are voluminous and point to a clear conclusion: regular doses of solitude, mixed in with our default mode of sociality, are necessary to flourish as a human being. It’s more urgent now than ever that we recognize this fact, because, as I’ll argue next, for the first time in human history solitude is starting to fade away altogether.

Writing in the 1980s, Anthony Storr complained that “contemporary Western culture makes the peace of solitude difficult to attain.” He pointed to Muzak and the recent invention of the “car telephone” as the latest evidence of this encroachment of noise into all parts of our lives.

If you stood on a busy city street corner in the early 1990s, you would not see too many people sporting black foam Sony earphones on their way to work. By the early 2000s, however, if you stood on that same street corner, white earbuds would be near ubiquitous. The iPod succeeded not just by selling lots of units, but also by changing the culture surrounding portable music.

To put this in context, previous technologies that threatened solitude, from Thoreau’s telegraph to Storr’s car phone, introduced new ways to occasionally interrupt time alone with your thoughts, whereas the iPod provided for the first time the ability to be continuously distracted from your own mind.

The iPod was pushing us toward a newly alienated phase in our relationship with our own minds. This transformation started by the iPod, however, didn’t reach its full potential until the release of its successor, the iPhone, or, more generally, the spread of modern internet-connected smartphones in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Even though iPods became ubiquitous, there were still moments in which it was either too much trouble to slip in the earbuds (think: waiting to be called into a meeting), or it might be socially awkward to do so (think: sitting bored during a slow hymn at a church service). The smartphone provided a new technique to banish these remaining slivers of solitude: the quick glance. At the slightest hint of boredom, you can now surreptitiously glance at any number of apps or mobile-adapted websites that have been optimized to provide you an immediate and satisfying dose of input from other minds.

In fact, he’s remarkably typical: the average Moment user spends right around three hours a day looking at their smartphone screen, with only 12 percent spending less than an hour. The average Moment user picks up their phone thirty-nine times a day. As Holesh reminds Alter, these numbers probably skew low, as the people who download an app like Moment are people who are already careful about their phone use.

Solitude Deprivation A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.

This obsession with connection is clearly overly optimistic, and it’s easy to make light of its grandiose ambition, but when solitude deprivation is put into the context of the ideas discussed earlier in this chapter, this prioritization of communication over reflection becomes a source of serious concern. For one thing, when you avoid solitude, you miss out on the positive things it brings you: the ability to clarify hard problems, to regulate your emotions, to build moral courage, and to strengthen relationships. If you suffer from chronic solitude deprivation, therefore, the quality of your life degrades. Eliminating solitude also introduces new negative repercussions that we’re only now beginning to understand. A good way to investigate a behavior’s effect is to study

population that pushes the behavior to an extreme. When it comes to constant connectivity, these extremes are readily apparent among young people born after 1995—the first group to enter their preteen years with access to smartphones, tablets, and persistent internet connectivity. As most parents or educators of this generation will attest, their device use is constant. (The term constant is not hyperbole: a 2015 study by Common Sense Media found that teenagers were consuming media—including text messaging and social networks—nine hours per day on average.) This group, therefore, can play the role of a cognitive canary in the coal mine. If persistent solitude deprivation causes problems, we should see them show up here first. And this is exactly what we find.

This administrator told me that she had begun seeing major shifts in student mental health. Until recently, the mental health center on campus had seen the same mix of teenage issues that have been common for decades: homesickness, eating disorders, some depression, and the occasional case of OCD. Then everything changed. Seemingly overnight the number of students seeking mental health counseling massively expanded, and the standard mix of teenage issues was dominated by something that used to be relatively rare: anxiety.

The sudden rise in anxiety-related problems coincided with the first incoming classes of students that were raised on smartphones and social media. She noticed that these new students were constantly and frantically processing and sending messages. It seemed clear that the persistent communication was somehow messing with the students’ brain chemistry. A few years later, this administrator’s hunch was validated by San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge, who is one of the world’s foremost experts on generational differences in American youth. As Twenge notes in a September 2017 article for the Atlantic, she has been studying these trends for over twenty-five years, and they almost always appear and grow gradually. But starting around 2012, she noticed a shift in measurements of teenager emotional states that was anything but gradual: The gentle slopes of the line graphs [charting how behavioral traits change with birth year] became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it. Young people born between 1995 and 2012, a group Twenge calls “iGen,” exhibited remarkable differences as compared to the Millennials that preceded them. One of the biggest and most troubling changes was iGen’s psychological health. “Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed,” Twenge ...

The defining trait of iGen, she explains, is that they grew up with iPhones and social media, and don’t remember a time before constant access to the internet. They’re paying a price for this distinction with their mental health. “Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones,” Twenge concludes.

“Anxious kids certainly existed before Instagram,” he writes, “but many of the parents I spoke to worried that their kids’ digital habits—round-the-clock responding to texts, posting to social media, obsessively following the filtered exploits of peers—were partly to blame for their children’s struggles.”

Lots of potential culprits, from stressful current events to increased academic pressure, existed before the spike in anxiety that begins around 2011. The only factor that dramatically increased right around the same time as teenage anxiety was the number of young people owning their own smartphones.

When an entire cohort unintentionally eliminated time alone with their thoughts from their lives, their mental health suffered dramatically. On reflection, this makes sense. These teenagers have lost the ability to process and make sense of their emotions, or to reflect on who they are and what really matters, or to build strong relationships, or even to just allow their brains time to power down their critical social circuits, which are not meant to be used constantly, and to redirect that energy to other important cognitive housekeeping tasks.

Simply put, humans are not wired to be constantly wired.

But as Maynard explains, this complicated mixture of solitude and companionship is not a secret Thoreau was trying to hide. It was, in some sense, the whole point. “[Thoreau’s] intention was not to inhabit a wilderness,” he writes, “but to find wildness in a suburban setting.” We can substitute solitude for wildness in this sentence without changing its meaning.

What Thoreau sought in his experiment at Walden was the ability to move back and forth between

state of solitude and a state of connection.

The pianist Glenn Gould once proposed a mathematical formula for this cycle, telling a journalist: “I’ve always had a sort of intuition that for every hour you spend with other human beings you need X number of hours alone. Now what that X represents I don’t really know . . . but it’s a substantial ratio.”

The failed fight against cell phones in movie theaters is a specific consequence of a more general shift that’s occurred over the past decade: the transformation of the cell phone from an occasionally useful tool to something we can never be apart from. This rise of cell phone as vital appendage is supported by many different explanations.

Put another way, in 90 percent of your daily life, the presence of a cell phone either doesn’t matter or makes things only slightly more convenient.

the urgency we feel to always have a phone with us is exaggerated.

Succeeding with this strategy requires that you abandon the belief that not having your phone is a crisis. As I argued above, this belief is new and largely invented, but it can still take some practice before you fully accept its truth. If you’re struggling at first, a useful compromise is to bring your phone where you’re going, but then leave it in your car’s glove compartment.

“Only thoughts reached by walking have value.” To underscore his esteem for walking, Nietzsche also notes: “The sedentary life is the very sin against the Holy Spirit.”

Nietzsche began to walk up to eight hours a day. During these walks he would think, eventually filling six small notebooks with the prose that became The Wanderer and His Shadow, the first of many influential books he wrote during a decade powered by ambulation.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who once wrote: “I never do anything but when walking, the countryside is my study.” About Rousseau, Gros adds: “The mere sight of a desk and a chair was enough to make him feel sick.”

These historical walkers embraced the activity for different reasons. Nietzsche regained his health and found an original philosophical voice. Berry formalized his intuitive nostalgia. Thoreau found a connection to nature he thought fundamental to a thriving human life. These different reasons, however, are all served by the same key property of walking: it’s a fantastic source of solitude.

Motivated by these historical lessons, we too should embrace walking as a high-quality source of solitude. In doing so, we should heed Thoreau’s warning that we’re not talking about a short jaunt for a little exercise, but honest-to-goodness, deep-in-the-woods, Nietzsche-on-the-slope-of-a-mountain-style long journeys—these are the grist of productive aloneness.

I sometimes go on what I call “gratitude walks,” where I just enjoy particularly good weather, or take in a neighborhood I like, or, if I’m in the middle of a particularly busy or stressful period, try to generate a sense of anticipation for a better season to come. I sometimes start a walk with the intent of tackling one of these goals, and then soon discover my mind has other ideas about what really needs attention. In such instances, I try to defer to my cognitive inclinations, and remind myself how hard it would be to pick up these signals amid the noise that dominates in the absence of solitude. In short, I would be lost without my walks because they’ve become one of my best sources of solitude.