Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

by Cal Newport

online discussion seems to accelerate people’s shift toward emotionally charged and draining extremes. The techno-philosopher Jaron Lanier convincingly argues that the primacy of anger and outrage online is, in some sense, an unavoidable feature of the medium: In an open marketplace for attention, darker emotions attract more eyeballs than positive and constructive thoughts.

I’ve become convinced that what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.

we cannot passively allow the wild tangle of tools, entertainments, and distractions provided by the internet age to dictate how we spend our time or how we feel. We must instead take steps to extract the good from these technologies while sidestepping what’s bad. We require a philosophy that puts our aspirations and values once again in charge of our daily experience, all the while dethroning primal whims and the business models of Silicon Valley from their current dominance of this role; a philosophy that accepts new technologies, but not if the price is the dehumanization Andrew Sullivan warned us about; a philosophy that prioritizes long-term meaning over short-term satisfaction. A philosophy, in other words, like digital minimalism.

Digital Minimalism A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

If a new technology offers little more than a minor diversion or trivial convenience, the minimalist will ignore it. Even when a new technology promises to support something the minimalist values, it must still pass a stricter test: Is this the best way to use technology to support this value? If the answer is no, the minimalist will set to work trying to optimize the tech, or search out a better option.

minimalists don’t mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.

approaching decisions with intention can be more important than the impact of the actual decisions themselves.

The goal is not to simply give yourself a break from technology, but to instead spark a permanent transformation of your digital life.

Does this technology directly support something that I deeply value?

As Kethledge and Erwin explain, however, 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.

“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.

Part of what complicates discussions of waning solitude in the smartphone age is that it’s easy to underestimate the severity of this phenomenon. While many people admit that they use their phones more than they probably should, they often don’t realize the full magnitude of this technology’s impact.

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

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

It’s in this long trajectory that we can place digital minimalism. This philosophy is meant to be a human bulwark against the foreign artificiality of electronic communication, a way to take advantage of the wonders that these innovations do in fact provide (Maine and Texas, it turns out, did have some useful things to say once connected), without allowing their mysterious nature to subvert our human urge to build a meaningful and satisfying life.

Adopting digital minimalism is not a onetime process that completes the day after your digital declutter; it instead requires ongoing adjustments.