Hello! Today’s newsletter is split into two parts - a personal reflection, and a piece on Digital Minimalism. I picked up Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism in early 2020 while I was living in New York. It was during a time in my life when I was rethinking my relationship with social media, how I present myself online and how I should use it. These questions really took my down a rabbit hole, so much so that I began to question whether I should be using social media at all. But right as I began reading this book, the pandemic hit and we were confined to our rooms with no access to the outside world except for through our smartphones. Not the best time to become a Digital Minimalist, I thought, and kept the book away.
Fast forward two years and the first book I picked up when I decided to start living more intentionally was this book. I wanted to complete reading it to teach myself the Digital Minimalism philosophy and integrate it into my life. Here, I share my takeaways and insights from the book, highlighting why I resonate with this practise and suggest you give it a try too.
In the personal reflection part of this newsletter, I write about home, identity and the narratives we create for ourself. It is an extension of a prose I wrote a few years ago on this topic when I was last in Madanapalle. I am back here again so it seemed natural to revisit the topic. Also, since I am in India this week, there will be no coffee date but I am setting this Calendly up to schedule meetups because some of you told me you would prefer that :) So book away for next weekend (I will be back in SG this Sunday)! Lets explore some cute cafes and chat.
calendly.com/nikitavattas/30min
I. Digital Minimalism
The Philosophy
Digital Minimalism is one of the most relevant philosophies of our time as it highlights the importance of a focused life in a noisy world. Cal Newport has integrated the theories of minimalism, essentialism and intentionality with technology-use to write a thought-provoking book on this philosophy. In his words -
“Digital Minimalism (is) a philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.”
~ Cal Newport
The book calls for us to reassess our relationship with technology, declutter our digital life and organise it in a manner that is more intentional. During the digital declutter, you will not only take a break from optional technologies in your life, but also discover and actively practise activities and behaviours that you find satisfying and fulfilling. For example, for me that was reading, writing and dancing - things I thought I did not have time for but managed to do regularly during this period. The process helped me reclaim leisure, embrace solitude and reduce anxiety.
The Digital Declutter Process (From Digital Minimalism)
Put aside a thirty-day period during which you will take a break from optional technologies in your life.
During this thirty-day break, explore and rediscover activities and behaviors that you find satisfying and meaningful.
At the end of the break, reintroduce optional technologies into your life, starting from a blank slate. For each technology you reintroduce, determine what value it serves in your life and how specifically you will use it so as to maximize this value.
I didn’t take a month long break - I already had an idea of the technology I wanted and didn’t want in my life so I just took the following steps:
Remove Instagram from my home screen - In my opinion, much more effective than deactivating my profile as I know it is there when I need it but not easily accessible. This reduced my screen time on the app by 98%, freeing up about 12 hours of my time in a week. No wonder I was able to finish reading three books in a month!
Removing LinkedIn from my home screen - its just toxic scrolling through this app to compare yourself to others. I have a job, I am going to focus on it rather than think of the other things that I could be doing.
Deactivating Facebook - I mean, it was about time…
I dont’ use any other social media platform apart from my blogging sites so this list was sufficient for my declutter. Maybe in a few months, I’ll take this one step further and distance myself from my phone and laptop if possible.
The Perils of Technology and its Impact on Individuality
The point of the Digital declutter is to take a disciplined break long enough to re-wire your addicted brain. We often overlook the non-apparent, now normalised influences of technology in our lives that make them more addictive.
Take our earphones for example - does the thought of leaving your earphones behind when you leave the house cause a little bit of anxiety or frustration? If it doesn’t, Im impressed. We have become dependent on music, podcasts and voices that are anyone’s but our own to distract us from what is going on around us.
If not a distraction from your own thoughts, this need for easy access to audio highlights our need for constant stimulation. All these behaviours add to the wave of solitude deprivation that a lot of people have begun to struggle with.
Solitude Deprivation
A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from the input from other minds.
Not spending enough time alone with your thoughts does not seem as dangerous or as scary as addiction, but it does have long term effects. Solitude is essential to the development of the human brain and removing it completely from our lives can restrict our progress as an individual and to an extension, as a community. I really like this quote from the book -
“Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.”
Addiction and solitude deprivation are both fuelled by our consumerist culture that thrives on capturing as much for your attention, your brain-time, as possible. Behind each device and application you use, there are brilliant innovators whose job is to find ways to capture more of your time and attention. Their KPIs are screen time and number of clicks and their roadmap to success revolves around increasing your dependency on their applications. By using these applications regularly, you are trading your attention, selling it even, to “attention economy conglomerates” that promise more freedom but are actually degrading your individuality.
Addictions are scary, most of us hear terrible stories about what happens when you have too much alcohol, junk food or spend too much gambling, the same could apply to addiction to technology and the way it causes stress, anxiety and diminishes the value of our time.
Digital Minimalism is not against technology - it is against the way we use it and proposes that we learn how to tailor our use to keep it minimal, just as we would junk food and alcohol.
II. On Home, Narratives and the Stories We Tell
Home is a sense of belonging. It is closely tied to one’s identity as it forms the foundation for the narrative you will begin to construct for yourself. Although narratives evolve, its roots and its central themes stay consistent through major chapters of your life. Hence, having a place you accept as your home - where you are from or where you belong - remains essential to who you are throughout your life.
A few years back, in fact during my last visit to Madanapalle in 2018, I wrote a piece called Home. I thought I would revist this topic since I am back in Madanpalle, a place I always considered home. The prose was written in an attempt to understand what home meant to me and it concluded with - “It is where my mind and body are most comfortable and at ease.” It has been four years since I wrote this - but my thoughts on what it means remain unchanged. Home is indeed where the heart is, and the heart is where my mind and body are most at ease.
It sounds simple but there is more to it. What does it take for your mind and body to be at ease? I think it boils down to these factors - emotional security, familiarity that enables connection, and individual agency. If either one of these aspects is missing, there is a threat to the sense of ease that home is meant to bring with it. Home is complicated, but there is little in life that is not.
I suppose I am writing this to remind myself that my idea of home has, remarkably, remained constant. I believe that is rare in today’s world where transient cities and lifestyles have become a norm. Where impermanence has found a permanent space in our culture. What do you think? Has your sense of home changed over the years or has it stayed the same?
Lucky as I am to be able to hang on to my sense of identity for so long, I must also remind myself that home is not a place, but a feeling, it a sense of belonging. The feeling does not have to have a physical space attached to it, if it does and your identity seems tied to it, remember that the space is nothing more than a fragment of the the narrative you have attached to your sense of identity, and that it can evolve, transform, or even wither away.
End.
Yours Truly,
Nikita Vattas