On Digital Minimalism

http://calnewport.com/blog/2016/12/18/on-digital-minimalism/

by 0x54MUR41 • 10 years ago

166 71 10 years ago

huhtenberg3• 10 years ago

The modern minimalism movement ...

... is an oxymoron.

It is plenty obvious from a quick scan of https://reddit.com/r/minimalism where they struggle with reconciling all different interpretations of minimalism on daily basis. For some it's asceticism, for others it's having just one Rolex instead of 10 Seikos. There's also a separate circus from the "Help, my SO wants to buy a 2nd fork!" variety.

There's no single prominent movement, it's very much all over the place and to each his own.

imgabe• 10 years ago

The problem I had with /r/minimalism is that it's more focused on the aesthetic movement rather than the lifestyle movement. A 4,000sf house with sparse furniture and clean straight lines is minimalist in an aesthetic sense, but not really in the sense of owning only exactly what you need to do what you want and no more. The two meanings of minimalism seem to create a lot confusion and conflict about whether a given thing is "minimalist".

huhtenberg3• 10 years ago

not really in the sense of owning only exactly what you need to do what you want and no more

It's one and the same really. Once you have a bit more money the pragmatic live-in-a-shoebox minimalism tends to transform into the "aesthetic" variety - you still own a bare minimum that makes you happy, but you can now afford a better quality of the same. Be it a larger place or a more expensive pair of jeans.

lamacase• 10 years ago

From the article:

Minimalism is a lifestyle that helps people question what things add value to their lives.

The movement involves reflecting on your personal values, so of course it's going to have almost as many expressions as there are people doing it.

matwood5• 10 years ago

I would add that it helps people not just to think about things adding value, but also add costs. It's the old Fight Club adage about "the things you own, own you", and "only when you have nothing, can you do anything."

While it can be taken to the extreme, the underlying premise is true. Buy a new car and you're going to be worried about taking care of it. Buy a used car and you're a bit less worried b/c it already has some scratches. Don't buy a car at all, and you're never worried about the car (maybe how to get places if you don't live in a city...)

The goal should be to only add things to your life where the value is more than the costs. One situation where people have huge differing opinions is kids. Kids probably cost more than anything else someone can obtain in life. They are expensive money wise, time wise, and emotionally, but for some the value is huge, and others not so much.

SuperPaintMan2• 10 years ago

One of the hardest parts I've found in winnowing the amount of sheer information I process every day was my iPhone. I solved it by limiting my access to a few key apps, silencing non-critical notifications(Re: Email) and deleting Safari. Anything that I can access through a browser and check once a day (Here's looking at you Instagram) was locked out of my phone/removed. Downside: The Internet is no longer in my pocket and occasionally I am required to use 411 and call someone.

Turned my iPhone into a almost-dumbphone using Configurator and have seen nothing but improvements to daily-life. > http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/10/hands-on-securing-ios-p...

matwood5• 10 years ago

That sounds more like an extreme way to deal with the lack of self discipline (deleting Safari??). If it works for you, great. For me minimalism is about how do I get what I need/want in the least amount of time and as little waste as possible.

First was how to deal with news. I find the 5 minute NPR news briefing podcast from the latest hour is great. Honestly, news just does not change that much, so listening to that briefing once or twice a day is plenty. If I have more time that day, I'll also listen to WSJ tech or Planet Money podcasts.

Next, the Google app on the iPhone does a great job at summarizing things I typically want to know about. I was using the Apple equivalent of this, but it simply does not know me like Google does (for better or worse). I can open the Google app and see the weather, traffic, etc..., scan it and go.

For email, Inbox is configurable to only send alerts for certain classes of email. I get alerts only when they matter, and everything else can wait until I'm at a computer to check.

tonyedgecombe• 10 years ago

"That sounds more like an extreme way to deal with the lack of self discipline"

But the OP clearly doesn't have enough self discipline (or more likely spends it elsewhere), so perhaps it is a good idea.

BeetleB3• 10 years ago

For me minimalism is about how do I get what I need/want in the least amount of time and as little waste as possible.

That's not what minimalism is for most people. I want a lot of things. More than I have time for. Minimalism is about figuring out the marginal value each of those provides and eliminating all but the top x percent.

It's about reducing the stuff you feel you need. Your approach sounds more like you are not doing that.

I find the 5 minute NPR news briefing podcast from the latest hour is great.

Sorry for changing the topic, but as a former news junkie, I've long wanted to write a lengthy essay on how/why to read the news. If there is one thing I would want people to get out of that essay, it is that when it comes to news, the path of moderation is the one that will make you the most misinformed.

There's so much misinformation out there that the only way I could get an idea of what was going on was to spend many hours a month reading up news from multiple sources, and potentially multiple analyses. Only then would you get a fuller picture. Any given single story was highly likely to be missing or misreporting key information. And certain stories would not be covered by some organizations but covered by others. By listening to a given news outlet, you have no idea what important stories are not being told.

I did this for several years before calling it quits (too much time for not much personal value). But I knew from my past experience with dealing with people who only "scanned" the news (or listed to the news summary on BBC/NPR) that they tended to be quite misinformed. So the only option was to more or less quit altogether.

Even then, a few months later, I found myself having opinions on current events. Why? Because I still randomly scanned newspaper headlines while walking or listened to NPR broadcasts while driving. I had become the misinformed person.

The person who doesn't follow news altogether tends to be less misinformed. They are certainly ignorant, but they have fewer faulty notions.

These days, have I really gone cold turkey? Not really. I do still read/listen to it. But I do it while refusing to draw any conclusions.

Long story short: If you want to follow the news, either do it wholeheartedly or quit. No middle ground in this world.

amiga-workbench2• 10 years ago

I downgraded back to a Motorola RAZR V3i for about six months this year, I could browse HN over GPRS with Opera Mobile and download my mail on request, but had no sync and no deluge of notifications.

The battery life was very welcome too!

pcbro141• 10 years ago

How much would you say your sense of well-being improved?

oliv__• 10 years ago

Buy yourself a cheap flip phone?

SuperPaintMan2• 10 years ago

I already have the iPhone and it still runs a few apps that I need to use on a day to day basis. Also my previous feature phone couldn't deal with emoji :(

It does have a 5 day battery life now though.

glaberficken• 10 years ago

I think the keyword here is "tool". Using a piece of software as a tool as opposed to the software using you.

drdeadringer• 10 years ago

Right. "What do I want to do? Here is the tool for me to do that."

miguelrochefort9• 10 years ago

I'm obsessed with minimalism. I want all my possessions to fit inside my backpack. I own one pair of socks. I sleep on the floor.

I still struggle with digital minimalism. The current state of software is unbelievably fragmented. I have literally created over 500 accounts in my life. I have more than 100 apps on my phone. This so-called software diversity makes my life miserable.

I've been attempting to solve this problem for the past 10 years. I came to the conclusion that we need to create a single app that does 80% of things. Somehow, people still don't believe this is desirable or possible. I can't grasp why.

0xCMP• 10 years ago

I agree, have been trying to attain this as well for the longest time.

Davidp00• 10 years ago

Being able to fit all my possessions in a backpack is something I think about.

Can you go in to more detail on the stuff you own?

In what kind of climate do you live in? It seems a lot easier to not have a lot of stuff when you don't have to have cloths for multiple seasons.

miguelrochefort9• 10 years ago

I have not reached that goal yet. I still own more things than I should.

If you want inspiration, you can find it there: https://www.reddit.com/r/onebag/

Here's a good example: http://tynan.com/gear2017

I live in Canada, so it's not going to be as easy as if I lived in California.

throw9383412• 10 years ago

I live in western Canada, a pair of long johns, jeans and a coat are enough to spend an hour in -25 °C. I own a few things that I don't mind getting rid of when I move like a snowboard and a mattress, otherwise my clothes + toiletries + laptop/phone is it.

chickenfries• 10 years ago

I find having substantially less than 100 apps very easy, but I would find living without most of my possessions (the things I cook with, the clothes I wear to work) incredibly difficult. Do you feel like having a second pair of socks would really weigh you down? How is sleeping on the floor acceptable but having less than 100 apps hard?

miguelrochefort9• 10 years ago

I find having substantially less than 100 apps very easy, but I would find living without most of my possessions (the things I cook with, the clothes I wear to work) incredibly difficult.

You need to embrace the fact that delegating is ultimately more efficient than the alternative. You can focus a lot more on what matters when you let others cook for you, drive you around, repair your stuff, wash your stuff, etc. Once you realize that, owning a washing machine, a oven, a car, a house, power tools, makes very little sense. Unfortunately, these services tend to be expensive, but hopefully this will change once more people migrate to a similar lifestyle.

Regarding apps, you can't avoid them anymore. I have apps for door locks, alarms, parking meters, taxi, food, pressure cooker, time sheets, messaging (10), etc.

Do you feel like having a second pair of socks would really weigh you down?

I agree that one pair is extreme, but it taught me that I really don't need more, which is the key here. I will mots likely add a second pair for convenience at some point.

How is sleeping on the floor acceptable but having less than 100 apps hard?

I sleep on the floor by choice. I happen to sleep next to my bed.

galfarragem• 10 years ago

I'm obsessed with minimalism. I want all my possessions to fit inside my backpack. I own one pair of socks. I sleep on the floor.

Like everything in life the answer is in moderation. I do also tend towards minimalism but as a way to increase my freedom, not the opposite.

miguelrochefort9• 10 years ago

I do also tend towards minimalism but as a way to increase my freedom, not the opposite.

These things increases my freedom.

GuiA2• 10 years ago

Maybe there's a niche there for a very very pared down computer. Like a typewriter with a monochrome screen that lets you minimally browse a subset of the web (e.g. Wikipedia), do email, word processing, play mp3s, open PDFs, and that's it.

Maybe you want a color screen for YouTube/photos, but that's it.

If this feels more like a microwave or radio than full computer, this is something that someone like my grandparents would be very content with.

miguelrochefort9• 10 years ago

I don't want to pare down anything. If anything, I believe that computers are not powerful (in a UI sense) enough. I want to do more with my computer, and I have no problem depending on it.

What I have a problem with, is walled gardens and UIs designed by hand. It makes no sense that the UI for hailing a cab, ordering a pizza or reviewing a movie should be different. What we really need, is a better language, a new communication paradigm.

rokhayakebe• 10 years ago

Chromebook?

jasonkostempski2• 10 years ago

We don't need to do anything, you need to learn self control :) So do I, but I've gotten much better in the past 2 years. Start deleting accounts and apps, all of them, it's an amazing feeling. Note: HN won't let you delete your account, something that wouldn't have bothered me if I hadn't used my real name, but since I did, it drives me nuts. Looks like you might have the same problem.

habitue• 10 years ago

I came to the conclusion that we need to create a single app that does 80% of things

This is called a web browser

crististm• 10 years ago

Nope... A browser is just a HAL.

wott3• 10 years ago

I fail to understand how this:

I'm obsessed with minimalism. I want all my possessions to fit inside my backpack. I own one pair of socks. I sleep on the floor.

is compatible with that:

I have literally created over 500 accounts in my life. I have more than 100 apps on my phone. This so-called software diversity makes my life miserable. I came to the conclusion that we need to create a single app that does 80% of things.

I guess the problem lies in "100 applications that do things". What do they actually do? What are the 100 things they do? I don't have any app. I don't have any smartphone. Nobody had a few years ago. What problem do they solve that you cannot solve otherwise?

icebraining3• 10 years ago

I can't speak for miguelrochefort, but I'd say the problem is that doing those things without a smartphone is often even worse. For example, I dislike having Uber on my tablet, but it still beats having to call a cab.

jtcond13• 10 years ago

Do people feel that reading Hacker News meets these principles? On one hand there's a lot of good links and discussions here, but a significant portion is either too obscure or just not very interesting (e.g. most medium.com links). How do you optimize your HN reading to maximize time spent learning?

jasonkostempski2• 10 years ago

I use an RSS reader and filter certain domains, medium.com being one of them :) Cuts way down on the noise and prevents rescanning over stuff I've already read or dismissed.

ycmbntrthrwaway• 10 years ago

Actually I use a habit tracking app, where one of the habits is "no news but HN". HN is an improvement compared to reading any other news source or various reddits.

ivan_ah• 10 years ago

A couple of years ago I was forced to buy a smartphone (to get into Android dev), but I didn't get a data plan. I've been very happy with this decision. Most of the useful mobile apps I use (transit/maps/email) work well enough offline, but I don't get any notifications or interruptions.

I still struggle with internet addiction through my laptop, but at least the phone isn't adding to the problem.

adpoe• 10 years ago

I strongly agree with Cal on this. I write software and generally spend much of my time focusing on how to better design digital technologies of various kinds.

But ultimately, I think that good design is typically subtractive, not additive. The best digital products improve our lives--our lives in the physical world--while sucking up as little of our attention, mental effort, and personal information as possible.

I think it's only a matter of time before we see these attitudes become more prevalent (precisely because they are controversial/reactionary), and the general design ethos of Silicon Valley shifts as a result.

One of the key tensions of the near future may be between minimalism and maximalism in this way: should we throw more and more computation power at every single "problem", brute-forcing a solution to each for its own sake? Or should we optimize, and find the smallest, least intrusive, most elegant and simplest solution? I know which one sounds better to me. But will that drive business revenue? We'll see.

Perhaps more importantly though, at a certain point--by creating so much digital detritus and complexity, our brute-force solutions and ever-present computation create a new set of problems (such as the need to filter information aggressively to get any useful value from it--which is what minimalism is all about). So maybe this is just the realization of that. We need a new layer on top of the computation infrastructure to __reduce__, to complete our maximalist designs. Either way, interesting.

SmkyMt• 10 years ago

"The best digital products improve our lives..."

I'd like to be as optimistic as you. But actually (sadly?) this already happens. Those who want to "improve" their lives at profit-from-advertising are running A-B tests to evaluate the "best"-ness of their design/development based on clicks, ad revenue, conversions etc. Those who wish to promote a political or religious viewpoint ...same.

You may not ever want to have your life "improved" in the way I choose to "improve" mine. There will be some digital technologies that leave the Facebook crowd feeling that they have better lives and others that do so for more niche markets (HN, anyone?).

dominotw• 10 years ago

e. The best digital products improve our lives--our lives in the physical world--while sucking up as little of our attention,

So glad the 'wearables revolution' is now relegated to dusty bottom shelves of target. Next on the chopping block is 'internet of shit', utility drones.

ddrmaxgt37• 10 years ago

Sep Kamvar (MIT Media Lab) has similar thoughts on what he calls self limiting technology. Instead of technology being useful initially, but then embedding itself and changing the way we live, technology could just solve the problem it sets out to solve and then just recede away.

He gave online dating as an example.

anexprogrammer• 10 years ago

The best digital products improve our lives ...

The trouble is, vanishingly few current products are designed to improve our lives first. We became the product existing to provide more data.

So we ended up with social networks that show us what produces most ad views not what's most helpful to network your friends and relatives. We've got phone "apps" that are just thin clients and give us todo apps that can't trigger an alarm unless it's got 4G.

I've ended up with an eclectic, almost intentionally obsolete, version of digital minimalism. I use old desktop apps, command line, text editors and old widgets. There's barely a web 2 app installed on phone or laptop, and browser visits social media less than once a month. Back to the 90s?

I'll visit here, reddit and one or two others for an hour a day. I need the net far less than 5 or 10 years ago unless I'm working, well researching.

The most interesting thing about the article, some of my tech friends, and where I've ended up is the number of techies who are starting to reject much of what we built!

imagist• 10 years ago

The trouble is, vanishingly few current products are designed to improve our lives first. We became the product existing to provide more data.

This, more than anything, is why I refuse to view ads and jealously guard my data.

xkarga00• 10 years ago

I ditched Facebook two years ago for all the principles stated in the article (among other reasons) and I have never looked back. I am literately a healthier person ever since. Minimalism is a way of life, having to think about or deal with less things or situations helps me handle those better. Great article.

Edit: One nit, the author mentions Orwell to describe today's social media. I would say it's more like what Aldous Huxley described in Brave New World and Neil Postman embodied in Amusing Ourselves To Death rather than an Orwellian world.

vinay427• 10 years ago

GPS helped solve a problem that existed for a long time before it came along (how do I get where I want to go?), so did Google (how do I find this piece of information I need?). Snapchat, by contrast, did not. Be wary of tools in this latter category as they tend to exist mainly to create addictive new behaviors that support ad sales.

I agree, in the case of Snapchat, but I don't see this as a very convincing argument that tools that solve new problems should induce caution because of potentially addictive behaviors. It seems like the author is using a few choice examples to make an assertion when perhaps a better argument (that I am hoping someone can provide) could be made.

andrewfong• 10 years ago

I think the larger point is that if you didn't perceive the problem as a problem before the tool existed, it might not actually be a problem. This is applicable outside of Internet technology too (e.g. fashionable clothing solves the problem of not being fashionable, but they also create the problem in the first place).

GuiA2• 10 years ago

The "problem" Snapchat solves is "I want to feel close to my loved ones when we're not in the same room", which is just as much of a human need as "how do i get where i want to go", if not more so.

Silly argument from the author.

csense• 10 years ago

I ditched Facebook back in 2008, and haven't regretted that decision since.

On Digital Minimalism

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