The Trojan Horse in Your Pocket

Springtime is always a time for self-reflection — a moment when the world emerges from the claws of winter and the world is born anew. This spring is a particularly interesting time for self-reflection. Why? Well, we've been spending a lot of time with ourselves these days.

As we enter spring 2021, a little more than a year into the Covid-era, I am still in quarantine (though now that I am fully vaccinated, I am starting to re-enter the world, slowly). Mostly, I spend every day with my fiancée, my dog, and myself. I haven't dined inside a restaurant since March of last year, and I have no idea when that will change. I think the last movie I saw in theaters might have been The Rise of Skywalker, which was December 2019.

At any rate, the point is: We've all had a lot of free time on our hands. The time that we would have spent at birthday parties or at the movies or crushing beers at a local bar has collapsed. I would have thought that this would have led to more free time than I would know what to do with, but as I finished 2020 and looked back on the year, I realized that I read fewer books than I had read in a long time. That time spent in a pre-Covid world, doing all of the things that mean so much to me — it wasn't entirely clear to me where it had gone.

Somehow, while I was thinking about this, I stumbled into a recommendation to read the book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport, and I am so glad that I did.

One of the primary ideas that drives the book is that increasingly, our smartphones (and screens in general) have become more and more dominant over our lives. Newport has come up with tips, strategies, values, and principles for you to reclaim autonomy over your smartphone. In his words, we should all develop a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in our deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools we should use and how we should use them, and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else. He calls smartphones the Trojan Horse for the attention economy.

The cornerstone of the book is about the "digital declutter." Think of it as Marie Kondo for your phone (and mind). The digital declutter is a period of a month or so where you intentionally limit the technology that you can use. Anything that is not essential for your personal life or work is eliminated from your phone. This includes any apps, websites, social media, and so on. The goal of the project is that you remove distraction from your life and are then able to return after the declutter with a newfound awareness for what you invite back into your phone, and what you allow yourself to pay attention to.

A digital minimalist, according to Newport, uses only the technology (apps, websites, and social media) that provides the maximum possible value, and brings the least possible harm. An example: In order to "stay in touch" with a cousin, a person likes the photos that the cousin posts on Instagram. But is that really the best way to stay in touch? Probably not. A phone call of twenty minutes, for instance, would provide a much better way of staying in touch with a cousin. A digital minimalist, in this example, would not use Instagram to stay in touch with the cousin, because it provides too many other distractions, and does not provide the maximum possible value.

The arguments that resonated the most with me were Newport's arguments that digital minimalism is a response to a world that we have backslid into, not a world that we have chosen, and that we need to achieve cognitive liberation from our devices. He says that we are suffering from "solitude deprivation," where any moment alone is filled by a quick glance at the phone, which can spiral into more and more phone use. The antidotes that he prescribes in response to solitude deprivation are high quality and high value activities, such as taking long walks by yourself and journaling.

Newport also advocates for a strenuous plan for leisure. He says that "doing nothing is overrated" and that by prioritizing demanding activity over passive consumption, a greater sense of accomplishment and happiness is achieved. He recommends that those who are interested in a digital minimalist lifestyle should fix or build something every week. One of my favorite quotes from the book is, "Leave evidence of yourself. Do good work." He suggests that learning to do activities like changing the oil on your car are immeasurably more satisfying than an afternoon spent scrolling through Twitter or TikTok.

I finished my digital declutter earlier this year. I keep a lot of apps on my phone, and I had to eliminate a lot of digital clutter. I downloaded a tool called Freedom that Newport describes in the book. Freedom blocks users from accessing certain websites or apps that they designate. I have a blocklist that runs 24 hours a day that has prevented me from accessing Instagram, Twitter, and a few other websites that I routinely visit every day that provide me no necessary information for my personal life or professional life.

In my newfound free time, I've been working on the first piece of furniture that I am building from scratch: a workbench. I've always enjoyed building furniture from IKEA and working on projects around the house, and after reading this book, I'm trying to lean into it more. Last week, I patched some drywall and painted over it. I do feel a special sense of accomplishment with this work, and it has been rewarding to see stuff come together. It's not just the pleasure of finishing a piece of handiwork, it's also the pleasure found in the learning that occurs in researching how to fix certain problems.

The largest change that I have noticed so far is in small moments — walking down a hallway, going to the bathroom, a brief interlude between meetings at work. I find myself absentmindedly reaching for my phone to... what? There is nothing there now, except for my texts, phone, and various other essential apps. This digital declutter has been a huge interruption to the ways I consume information which, as Newport describes in the book, is almost a ritual: I open one site, read through it, and then open the next. Usually opening one site leads me through a routine where I have to check all of the sites that I like to read. My consumption of information has become an unconscious, Rube Goldberg-like process. And now that the ritual has been interrupted, it seems like such a silly way to use time.

Newport also provides valuable historical context. The penny papers in the 1800s were the original attention economy — newspapers available for a single penny, subsidized by advertising, just as Facebook, Twitter, and Google monetize their free services today. He also notes that the iPhone was released in 2007, and that Steve Jobs spent most of its launch press conference talking about how the device would become the greatest phone ever — barely mentioning its connection to the internet and the App Store. We did not end up where we are by design, but rather unwittingly.

As we are in the Covid-era and many people are still in lockdown, I'm not sure that Digital Minimalism is the perfect book for the moment. In some ways, we are more reliant on technology than ever — I have only been able to stay in touch with friends and family over the past year thanks to Zoom calls, for example. But if you have felt less satisfied by your free time, feeling like your relationship with screens is out of whack, then this could be the perfect book for you.

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, by Cal Newport (2019). Follow The Frank Page on Instagram @The.Frank.Page to stay up to date with the latest posts and pods!