On Digital Minimalism

Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism is a sharp piece of intelligent self-help, teaching new ways to engage with technology meaningfully and on purpose. It came out in 2019 — an epoch ago, given how fast technology moves — and its insights matter more now than they did then.

“Digital minimalism” is a philosophy of how we use technology. The default for most of us, and I agree with Newport here, is digital maximalism: we use technology to wring the most out of it, filling our phones and our lives with low-quality, obsessive bloat for the occasional nugget of benefit. In the cutthroat competition of the attention economy, that actually makes life harder. At the core of Newport’s philosophy is the idea that we should choose our tools with intention, thinking hard about how each “feature” serves the life we actually want to live.

I learned the same lesson on my own a little over a year ago, when the low-level but incessant anxiety of being always connected became unbearable. I unplugged from all social media for about a year, and in the past few months I’ve reintroduced a few useful tools — on my computer, not my phone. It’s helped enormously; I’m still pulled by distractions on the computer, but they tend to be distractions of my own choosing rather than the pull of dings, lights, and corporate-optimized dopamine hits.

The message is simple, but the digital ecosystem we live in makes it hard to practice, and to his credit Newport offers clear, tangible, admirable strategies that could help even the most committed addict. The most helpful part is on cultivating quality leisure. Six hours on TikTok is obviously anything but — I get effectively nothing from the platform, though I can see how the content works as a kind of trendy glue for people younger than me. I’m past the age of needing to keep up with the trends to hold on to my peers, so I’m better off avoiding it entirely. LinkedIn offers a low-grade “leisure” of its own, but it’s a tool I’ve learned to use with intention, with no more aimless scrolling. For anyone who feels adrift, broadly speaking, this is a helpful book, because it offers a philosophy rooted in values rather than trends.