Digital Minimalism

The twentieth-first century has become a tech-dominated dystopia, as cartoonist Liam Francis Walsh humorously draws out. Walsh himself is a city dweller who doesn’t own a smartphone. This new sense of “digital minimalism”, a term coined by Cal Newport, is the reaction to this digitally consumed planet.

To put this into perspective just how dependent we are on technology, consider the hugely successful coffee chain Starbucks. Starbucks alone is responsible for selling about 4 billion cups of coffee each year. That is high demand for a commodity product, so much demand that this creates a problem, long lines. As a result, Starbucks has invested heavily in developing the technological infrastructure to allow for mobile ordering. When it first rolled out, Starbucks reported that over 6 million orders were placed through mobile orders each month. The idea behind mobile orders is that they free us from spending needless time waiting in line so that we can spend it being productive elsewhere. Back in February, when the Starbucks app went down, people were not happy.

When the Starbucks app is down so I gotta order at the counter like it’s the dark ages 🙄

— Braedi Zielinski (@braedi) February 28, 2019

When the @Starbucks app is down and you have to stand in line like a peasant. <<<

— Alondra (@StephAlondra) February 28, 2019

The fact is that even though we live in a time where may companies like Starbucks have embraced models that advertise as simplifying and automating the mundane so we can spend more time doing what we really care about and having more fun, the reality is that we may be the busiest generation to ever live.

Silicon Valley is full of software engineers programming day and night. Their primary purpose may be to develop social platforms, but their close secondary purpose is to program human behavior. At the end of the day, more clicks, more likes, more views equate more profits. Addiction is good for business, it shouldn’t be surprising to find out that “compulsive use is the foundation for many social media business plans.”

Intentionality

Automation tends to result in more work. An AI tool that can suddenly save you an hour or two from work does not translate to leaving work earlier but instead spending that time performing busy work instead. What can we do about this? For one, we can exercise our free will. This means favoring intention over convenience. In other words, spending less time reading feeds and engaging in online debates and spending more time alone.

Alone Time

Boredom is not the enemy. For many creatives, some of their great work stems from being bored. For many of us, this means spending more time alone. This can be in the form of reading or meditation. Newport personifies this leisure time spent on “activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity itself generates.” These activities should be active and not passive, requiring “real-world, structured social interactions.” Newport suggests either joining an organization or trying out a new hobby that actively uses our creativity to make something.

Leisure

Josef Pieper defines leisure as “silent, still, celebratory, and non-instrumental.” As Casey Chalk points out if everyone did a sport, volunteered, or performed manual labor instead of mindlessly spending time on social media, we as a society would be healthier.

Newport’s approach isn’t without issue. As Chalk describes unequivocally, pursuing a hobby can be easy when you are a “wealthy, white-collar technocrat with expendable income and time.” But, without a doubt, until we begin valuing community over connectivity or our own human flourishing over productivity, it’s best to limit the time we spend on technologies that leave us feeling worse off than we were before.

For the original article that inspired this post, please click here.

To see more work by cartoonist Liam Walsh, check him out @liam_f_walsh or liamfranciswalsh.com