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Becoming a Digital Minimalist

Assuming you've been convinced of the merits of not getting "screen sucked" by social media, the second section focuses on helping the reader to understand some of the ways that they can practice digital minimalism. Newport suggests that to start with, you should cut out all non-essential digital activity from your life for 30 days and replace it with fulfilling high quality leisure activities and goes on to explain more about what these are and are not (and I talk a bit more about his below).

Walden

Newport spends quite a long time talking about Henry Thoreau's Walden, specifically Thoreau's hyper focus on material minimalism and the maths he uses to decide how much of his time he should rent out as a farm labourer to support his lifestyle. He decides to scrape by on the absolute minimum because he'd rather experience life and the wilderness than keep up with the Joneses

Thoreau was able to satisfy all of his basic needs quite comfortably with the equivalent of one day of work per week. What these farmers are actually gaining from all the life they sacrifice is slightly nicer stuff: venetian blinds, a better quality copper pot, perhaps a fancy wagon for traveling back and forth to town more efficiently

The point Newport is trying to make, I think, is that if you are deliberate about how you want to spend your time (both generally but also in the context of how much time you spend online) you will have a more fulfilling life. Newport is pretty pragmatic throughout the book about all of his advice and I guess if you're consciously happy about how much time you spend doomscrolling then no change necessary. He is basically just trying to get people to be more intentional and thoughtful about how they spend their time and whether they themselves consider it a good use of time.

As a side note, I couldn't help thinking that for 1 day's hard labour in 2020, Thoreau would barely be able to feed himself for a week, nevermind build and run a small dwelling.

Solitude and Solitude Deprivation

This section of the book was something that I felt like I really did benefit from reading. Newport talks about the psychological state of solitude as a subjective state in which you’re isolated from input from other minds. A key implication of this definition is that it is decoupled from physical isolation. For example, you can experience mental solitude by sitting by yourself in a buzzing coffee shop and conversely you could go on a long walk in a forest but it's not in solitude if you're listening to a podcast, stopping to check your phone every 5 minutes or live-streaming it to your followers. According to a bunch of psychology studies solitude can be beneficial (sorry academic paywall) and helps us deal with our feelings and find inner peace.

Newport suggests that our cultural obsession with smartphones and always being connected has led to solitude deprivation i.e. we're never alone with our thoughts for more than a few minutes at a time because we're always reading a social media feed or listening to spotify or watching netflix etc so we never enter a state of solitude. It's almost like our phones are emotional pacifiers that allow us to avoid sitting with and processing our feelings. Anecdotally, I've been trying to reduce phone scrolling time since I started the book and I've definitely found that if I feel a negative emotion (say I received an email that annoyed me at work) I'm drawn back towards my phone.

I'm no psychologist but the studies I found appear to be in reasonably prestigious journals, the statistics looks reasonably good (from the POV of a data scientist peeking in through the window at a psychologist) and given my own experience I definitely buy the solitude deprivation angle and I'm going to try to catch myself whenever I get an urge to doomscroll following a negative feeling and try to sit with the feeling instead.

Another of Newport's arguments is that low bandwidth social interaction such as "likes" and "favourites" are bad news and that we should value higher bandwidth interactions like phone calls and video calls (this I can agree with). However, he also condemns texting and messaging, suggesting that they're not enough to sustain a relationship and should just be used for logistics like organising real face to face interactions.

I can't say I agree with this point wholly. Some of my best relationships are sustained over whatsapp and similar messaging services - one of which is my mum. We share stream of consciousness messages sporadically throughout the day, neither one of us obsesses over or worries about when the next message will arrive and its much easier than organising a phone call.

On that point, Newport suggests that people operate phone "office hours" - an extension of his academic "office hours" which, if you're not familiar, is basically a set time every week that academics set aside to be available to their students for a chat in their office - just turn up between X and Y time, no booking necessary. The idea then is that you tell your friends and family that you are around and able to take calls at a certain time every week to take the pressure off having to organise a time to chat. I do quite like that idea of getting the opportunity to chat to a random friend once a week but I feel like a lot of my friends and family are unlikely to take me up on the offer and would rather text or schedule in a one-off Zoom call.

High and Low Quality Hobbies

In this section of the book, Newport lays out the difference between high quality hobbies like arts and crafts, playing musical instruments, hiking and creative endeavors, and low quality hobbies like watching TV, scrolling down news feeds and looking at funny dog memes.

He talks about how we should prioritise high quality activities and gives some fairly extreme example including that of a couple that live in an isolated farm and spend all their days chopping down trees for wood. The implication of this section seemed to be there's little-to-no room in a digital minimalist's life for low quality activities and we should spend as much of our free time as possible doing virtuous activities and creating and "being valuable".

To me, this section has just a smack of grind culture vibe. I just don't agree that people always need to be creating or doing something "valuable" to have a rewarding life. Sometimes I want to eat half a tub of ice cream and watch a box set on netflix with my wife. I enjoy ice cream, I usually enjoy the plot of the TV show and I enjoy spending time with my wife. We have a "no phones" rule when we're watching TV together and we'll usually chat about what's happening so it is pretty good "quality" time spent together. If my last day on earth was spent watching movies with my wife and a bowl of Ben and Jerry's I think I'd die a happy man.

However, I do get his point. It is nice to have a purpose beyond our day job that's more than just social media consumption. When I'm not working for my company or on my PhD I like to build open source software, play my saxophone, go for a walk, bake and cook and write on my blog. However, I take my chill time very seriously too.

In fairness, Newport is pragmatic as always about this. His suggestion is that you prioritize higher quality hobbies rather than completely ban yourself from all low quality ones. With the best will in the world, nobody is going to be able to spend every waking moment that they're not at work being virtuous. Again, it's a call to readers to really be mindful about what we're doing with our time and make sure that, on balance, we're happy about how time is spent.

Planning Leisure Activities, Join ALL the Things

Newport suggests that people thoroughly plan their leisure time so that they can make the most of it - this way you can prepare yourself for any "high quality" activities that might have prerequisites (buy supplies, RSVP to events etc). His examples of how to plan are quite thorough and include hourly breakdowns of how you intend to spend your day.

My brain did a similar mental recoil to this section as the previous one in that sometimes I just want to sit and chill and I don't want to plan my every waking moment. However, what I can get behind is maybe time-boxing specific low quality activity e.g. "I'm going to give myself 10 minutes to check my twitter feed and I'm going to set a timer and stop when it goes off". This way I can try to avoid getting sucked in and losing hours of my evening to social media.

Newport also suggests that you should join lots of social groups and clubs or start new ones if a club you'd like to participate in doesn't exist and launches into an anecdote about Ben Franklin going from zero to hero in Philadelphia in the 1800s. I'm also quite keen to start going back to meetups and talks as face to face events start to pop up again post lock downs.

Minimal Phone

Another simple idea Newport suggests is minimising your phone. He notes that social media companies make most of their ad revenue from mobile-first usage - its easy to open up reddit and scroll when you've got 2 minutes waiting for a train or in a queue at a coffee shop (these are opportunities to read a book or people watch or sit in solitude).

His more extreme suggestion is to replace your smart phone with a dumb phone. However, that's not for everyone (and not for me) so the other option is just to remove all the screen-sucky apps from your phone. That's something I can definitely get behind. I've not had facebook or twitter on my phone for about 6 years and from now on I'll use time-boxing to check interesting subreddits and my fosstodon feed.

Concluding Thoughts

I enjoyed Newport's book and I didn't agree with everything he says but the general philosophy is something I can definitely get on board with. Some of the changes I want to make are:

Only look at my phone a couple of times a day unless someone calls me - exceptions allowed for urgent logistical and practical messages.
I really like the solitude thing. I'm going to make more of an effort to sit with my thoughts and try to stop myself from using social media as a digital "dummy"
I'm going to keep texting, I don't find my current level of texting to be obnoxiously high and I do find it valuable and so do my friends and my mum. If I need to phone anyone I'll text them and arrange a time rather than keeping office hours.
By being more mindful about time spent on social media platforms, I hope to spend more time doing high value leisure activities like baking, making music, reading and blogging. However, I'm not going to beat myself up for the odd night in front of the gogglebox and I'm not going to plan my personal life down to the minute in a spreadsheet.
I'm keeping my smartphone but I've removed some of the apps with the highest "screen suck" potential and I'll try to time-box when I look at it or look at it with a specific purpose in mind "I need to book a train ticket"
I have a bad habit of googling any question I have any time it arises in my mind - particularly things like "what's that actor doing now?" or "where was this scene filmed?". I'm going to write down my questions in my notebook to google later (and if I forget or can't be bothered when I revisit my notes then it obviously wasn't that important).

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