The Art of Digital Minimalism

Last week, I watched a man walk into a lamp post. Not metaphorically—actually, physically, face-first into a metal pole. He was looking at his phone, naturally, as we all are, always, forever, until the heat death of the universe or until the battery dies, whichever comes first. The lamp post, being a lamp post, did not move. The man bounced off, looked up with the confused expression of someone who'd briefly forgotten that physical reality exists, and then went straight back to his phone.

I found this hilarious until I realised I was watching him because I'd stopped walking to check my own phone. We are, all of us, becoming lamp post people.

This is what life looks like in 2024. We carry supercomputers in our pockets that can access the sum total of human knowledge, and we use them primarily to argue with strangers and look at pictures of other people's dinners. The average person now spends somewhere between seven and eight hours a day looking at screens—which means, if you're sleeping eight hours, you're spending roughly half your waking life in a digital environment.

Half. Your. Waking. Life.

If you spent half your waking life doing literally anything else—playing the violin, learning Mandarin, training for marathons—you'd be extraordinary at it by now. Instead, we've collectively become extraordinary at scrolling. Which, as skills go, is not one that looks particularly impressive on a CV.

The Attention Heist

Here's the thing that nobody at the technology companies wants you to think too hard about: their entire business model depends on stealing your attention. Not borrowing it. Not renting it. Stealing it, in the sense that once it's gone, you don't get it back.

Every app on your phone was designed by extremely clever people whose entire job was to make you use it more than you intended to. The infinite scroll. The pull-to-refresh mechanism that mimics a slot machine. The red notification badges that exploit your brain's evolved response to urgent stimuli. None of these are accidents. They're features, meticulously engineered to keep you engaged—which is a polite way of saying "to keep you addicted."

The result is a kind of low-grade cognitive chaos. Your attention is being sliced into ever-thinner fragments, distributed across an ever-growing number of platforms, each one demanding just a bit more of your time and mental energy. Meanwhile, the things that actually matter to you—your work, your relationships, your creative projects, your physical and mental health—have to compete for whatever scraps of attention are left.

This is not a fair fight. Your writing project doesn't have a team of engineers optimising it for engagement. Your relationship doesn't send push notifications. Your health doesn't have an algorithm designed to exploit your psychological vulnerabilities.

The Philosophy of Less

Digital minimalism, as a concept, starts from a simple premise: technology should serve your values, not the other way around. This is so obviously true that it feels almost embarrassing to state. And yet, if you honestly audit how you spend your digital time, you'll almost certainly discover that you're serving your technology far more than it's serving you.

The minimalist approach isn't about rejecting technology entirely. That would be absurd, and also impossible unless you're prepared to move to a remote mountain and grow your own vegetables, which sounds romantic until you actually try it. Instead, it's about being intentional. About choosing which technologies add genuine value to your life and ruthlessly eliminating those that don't.

This requires asking uncomfortable questions. Does having Instagram on your phone actually improve your life? Does checking email forty times a day make you better at your job, or just more anxious? Does the news feed you check every morning inform you in ways that matter, or just activate your stress response for no productive purpose?

For most people, when they're honest with themselves, the answers are not flattering.

The Detox Experiment

One popular approach to digital minimalism involves what's sometimes called a "digital detox"—a period of thirty days or so during which you dramatically reduce your optional technology use. You delete social media apps. You turn off notifications. You establish boundaries around when and how you use your devices.

The first few days of this experiment are, by all accounts, deeply unpleasant. You reach for your phone approximately seven thousand times and find nothing there. You experience something called "phantom vibrations"—the sensation that your phone is buzzing when it isn't. You feel bored, restless, and slightly panicked, as if something important might be happening somewhere and you're missing it.

This is withdrawal. Actual, genuine, neurological withdrawal from the dopamine hits that your phone has been supplying. And the fact that we experience this—that removing a device from your pocket can produce physiological symptoms of addiction—should probably concern us more than it does.

After the initial unpleasantness, something interesting happens. The boredom doesn't go away, but your relationship to it changes. Instead of being something to be avoided at all costs, boredom becomes a signal. Your brain, freed from the constant drip of digital stimulation, starts doing something it hasn't done in years: it starts thinking.

Not reacting. Not scrolling. Not absorbing. Thinking. Actual, independent, creative thought. The kind that solves problems and generates ideas and makes connections between disparate concepts.

This is what your mind does when you give it space to do it. This is what it's been trying to do all along, before you kept interrupting it with notifications about someone's cat.

Rebuilding, Intentionally

After the detox period, the point isn't to stay technology-free forever. That would be impractical and, frankly, unnecessary. The point is to reintroduce technology deliberately, item by item, asking each time: does this actually serve my values?

The answer might be yes. Email serves a legitimate purpose. So does a calendar. So, potentially, do certain social platforms used in certain ways. The key word is "certain." A photography community on Instagram might genuinely enrich your creative life. The main Instagram feed, algorithmically optimised to show you whatever will make you scroll longest, almost certainly won't.

This is the minimalist approach in practice: not abolition, but curation. Keeping the tools that work and discarding the rest. Establishing rules and boundaries that protect your attention from being hijacked. Treating your time and focus as the finite resources they actually are.

The Practical Bits

If you're convinced but unsure where to start, here are some principles that seem to work:

First, remove social media apps from your phone. You can still access them from a computer if you want, but the friction of having to sit down and log in will eliminate most of the mindless checking. You'll be surprised how little you miss them.

Second, turn off virtually all notifications. The only things that should be able to interrupt you are phone calls from actual humans and perhaps text messages from people who actually matter. Everything else—email, social media, news, apps of all varieties—can wait until you choose to look at them. You are not an emergency room doctor. Nothing on your phone is so urgent that it requires your immediate attention.

Third, establish device-free times and spaces. No phones in the bedroom. No phones at the dinner table. No phones in the first hour of the morning or the last hour before bed. These boundaries seem small but compound into something significant: stretches of time when your attention belongs entirely to you.

Fourth, replace the time you've reclaimed with activities that actually matter to you. This is the positive side of minimalism that's easy to forget. The point isn't just to use less technology; it's to do more of everything else. Read books. Go for walks. Have conversations with people who are physically present. Work on creative projects. Exercise. Stare out of windows. Do the things that you always say you don't have time for.

You have the time. You've been giving it away.

The Deeper Point

Behind all the practical advice, there's a deeper idea worth sitting with. Your attention is not just a resource; it's the fundamental medium of your experience. How you spend your attention is, in a very real sense, how you spend your life.

If you spend it on things that leave you feeling drained, anxious, and dissatisfied, your life will feel drained, anxious, and dissatisfied. If you spend it on things that leave you feeling fulfilled, connected, and genuinely engaged, your life will feel that way instead.

This seems obvious. It is obvious. And yet our collective behaviour suggests that we've somehow forgotten it. We've outsourced our attention to algorithms and let our devices dictate how we spend our time, and we've done it so gradually that we barely noticed it happening.

Digital minimalism is, at its core, just the process of noticing. Of stepping back and asking whether this is really how you want to live. Of reclaiming the authority to decide where your attention goes—an authority you always had, even when you forgot you had it.

The man who walked into the lamp post had forgotten. We all have, to varying degrees. But the good news is that attention, unlike time, can be redirected. You can't get back the hours you've already spent scrolling, but you can decide right now what to do with the next ones.

Put down the phone. Look up. There's a whole world out there, and lamp posts aside, it's worth paying attention to.

If you found this article valuable, you might enjoy reading Cal Newport's "Digital Minimalism," which explores these ideas in much greater depth. I'd recommend buying the actual book rather than the audiobook—less screen time, and all that.