My thirty day digital declutter

I followed the advice outlined by Cal Newport in 'Digital Minimalism' and removed all optional media from my life. Well, most of it.

I came upon Cal Newport’s ‘Digital Minimalism’ serendipitously; walked into my favourite bookstore in search of some holiday reading, and there it was, the first book I saw, at the front of the ‘under €5’ table. I was about a month into my own experiment with mindful media consumption, having replaced my stolen iPhone with an old Nokia. I’d been troubled the week prior by feeling like I’d not gone far enough; when at home, I just used my laptop as I would have my phone, scrolling social media on an interface more annoying but no less addictive, leading me to wonder whether I was really any better off. The blurb promised me that Newport would outline practically how to achieve the thing I was aiming for: to ‘live intentionally’. 

I am not a minimalist. Some of the objects on one of the windowsills in my kitchen include: an African fertility totem (as of yet, unsuccessful); a yellow model tram bought in Lisbon; a framed photo of my boyfriend as a child after a baseball game, blue lips and fingers from shovelling some cake; eight cook books, seven art books; an old Tullamore Dew pouring jug; a giant, fluffy, yuletide ‘Gingerbread Rat’ my mum picked up in Aldi (a friend, she said, for the field mice still invading my house); a jar containing probably one hundred pens beside another filled with long, pink matches; an empty gin bottle with three stalks of pampas grass protruding (purportedly the secret signal of swingers, accidental while not entirely inappropriate).

Marie Kondo would have to pry the African fertility totem from my cold, dead hands. Nothing so excites my soul as a thick film of dust. I have no interest in one day attaining that contemporary mark of successful middle-class ascension, an open-plan home; I like walls, preferably not white, preferably adorned. 

For all that, I do crave the kind of mental state Newport compellingly argues is achievable if one only develops a philosophy of media use. He’s right in pointing out a general approach which sees us all engaging with new tech on an experimental basis, trying to see through use if it can offer us some small utility, and ignoring all costs if such a generously low bar is satisfied. Newport argues for a relationship with tech mediated by fundamental values; we need not only ask the question, “does this technology support something I deeply value?”, but then after ask, “is this the technology the best way to serve that purpose?” An illustrative example: Instagram may serve a value by enabling you to keep in contact with a friend overseas, but it might not be the best way you can use tech to do that. And for whatever utility it does afford, it’s also designed to swallow up large chunks your time. Perhaps, rather than sporadic Story replies, you should schedule a long, monthly Zoom call, thereby maximising the utility tech affords while minimising the costs. 

So far, so intuitive. I was game to embark on the ‘digital declutter’ Newport outlined; thirty days where you cease using all ‘optional media’, at the end of which you reintroduce things which have passed a series of questions answered with honesty and integrity. Naïve as it seems to me now, I was sure that I could do this, and with relative ease.

I couldn’t. Not fully. 

I’ll start with the successes; I did last thirty days without using any social media, excepting one occasion where my free texts ran out and I needed to use Facebook to get in contact with my boyfriend. 

I felt, from the outset, deeply committed to the achievement of this part of the programme, because I realised that, since signing up to Facebook at the age of 12, I’d probably never gone more than a week or two without using some form of social media. I was driven by curiosity for what that would feel like, what shape the absence would take. 

The commitment didn’t make it easier necessarily, rather it just ensured my sticking with it when things got tough, which they did. I felt like an alcoholic getting sober, finally realising that the drink was not really the problem, more a maladaptive solution to many different problems they had hoped to never have to address. Since moving to the country, social media had acted as a stand-in for the kinds of relationships and connections I had found it difficult to cultivate in my real life. It had kept me from feeling the full extent of my loneliness. Over the course of the digital declutter, I had to reckon with it, which was really difficult; but being forced to sit with a feeling most often makes you realise how that feeling is attempting communion, offering insight. Much in my life hadn’t been working for me for a long time, and I’d known that and tried to ignore it. I decided I shouldn’t any longer. No lightning bulb moment followed, no crash of clarity, no big decision. Just a commitment to change and to be honest with myself about what I needed, and to no longer see dissatisfaction as a defeat. 

My other success was journalling, which I managed to do every day. That one was particularly important to me. The point of this experiment is mainly to learn how to appreciate, rather than merely tolerate, ‘solitude’, semantically distinct from simple alone-ness. Solitude is about convening with yourself, just being with your thoughts and feelings without input from others. So, I said, pare back the podcasts, start a discussion with yourself. Turns out I’m hilarious, really, really insightful, a total pleasure to be around. And, irrespective of any literary aims somebody may or may not possess, writing about the world makes you more a part of it somehow. Sontag said that “a writer is someone who pays attention to the world”, which implies a certain directionality; you pay attention, and then you write about what you’ve observed. I have often found it to work in the other way; when I begin the practice of writing, I thereafter pay more attention, my awareness of the raw materials around me suddenly heightened. Journalling in the morning felt like giving my brain an enema. 

Newport argues that you can’t take away one thing without replacing it with another; otherwise, you’re just creating a void. This is why he urges you to cultivate meaningful leisure time, something essential to making it through a digital declutter. A particular emphasis is placed in the book on learning new skills, working with your hands. I had noble intentions to do a macramé class and fashion a coat hanger from some driftwood I collected, neither of which I followed through on. I did however, harvest seaweed to prep some planter-beds for the Spring season and learned, via YouTube, how to scrub my shower floor clean with non-toxic ingredients (when this didn’t work initially I moved to using bleach immediately after, accidentally creating a potentially lethal chlorine gas from the residual vinegar, resulting in our having to open all the windows and leave the house as Google urged us to “get to higher ground”). 

Part of the difficulty with cultivating this productive leisure was simply the inconvenient, and presently immutable, realities of my life: I have a job, I’m writing a Masters thesis, I commit about six hours weekly to volunteer work. I try to juggle all of this with being a good partner and having small tendencies toward functional alcoholism. I believe Newport, that even in the busiest of lives, there remains hours under-utilised that can be yours for the taking with a little planning, a little commitment. I think I could have executed some plans; I just actually, in the end, didn’t have the mental bandwidth to come up with them. I often felt too burnt out to go full Henry David Thoreau; and besides, he didn’t have the All 4 Player at Walden. 

Which leads me to my failures. 

Newport permits some agency in defining ‘optional media’. Where you can almost certainly do without checking your Instagram Stories, you can’t neglect your work email. TV represents a grey area in all of this, particularly in the streaming epoch, where the default approach is the ‘binge’. I knew myself that my Real Housewives habit was a block between myself and many of the things I was aspiring to achieve; the disintegration of Bethenny and Carol’s relationship would always be more compelling than dense journal articles about polysomnography. So, it was out. No Housewives for a month. At the outset I said that all I would watch were films from the Sight & Sound Top 100. 

As of yet, Married At First Sight UK has not quite made that cut (by a slim margin, I’m sure), but, lo; thirty six hours of my life over the course of a fortnight were finally sunk into it. I put up a pathetic fight. I was tired. Of course I felt myself being manipulated; the machinations of reality TV are never opaque to its consumers, they just aren’t really a problem. It’s so enjoyable, allowing yourself to be pulled along, a donkey content to never catch the carrot, just grateful to have purpose. It is not sustainable to eradicate permanently any block between yourself and your emotions. There is life to get on with and often life is ugly, random and disappointing. Sometimes a sunset is enough, satiates briefly the soul’s constant restless yearning. And sometimes a sunset is just kind of boring and you’d rather be watching the disintegration of Bethenny and Carol’s relationship in your warm house. 

I came across some papers, when doing research for my thesis, by authors interested in the question of whether social media can attenuate loneliness (purportedly now an epidemic, and a phenomenon which can increase one’s risk of mortality by up to 26%). Even the most avid users of social media would likely acknowledge a contemporary consensus, that they’re most likely making us more disconnected, that the constant comparison they enable with the lives of others most often exacerbates our own feelings of inadequacy. However, the researchers found that the use of image-based social media, like Instagram and Snapchat, did attenuate loneliness, and even moderately correlated with increased life satisfaction and happiness. Twitter, here as in everywhere, was useless; text-based media can’t simulate the same feeling ‘social presence’ created by the audio-visual cues that image-based media afford. So, while there’s compelling evidence for a diagnosis of a lonely contemporary culture, there may be more work to do in establishing root causes. Perhaps a question to consider is whether social media may better qualify as a symptom. 

All in all, a useful experience, my failures at least serving to illuminate some of my own limits. Truthfully, I am excited to return to Instagram. I had film developed from my holiday in Athens and there’s a hot pic of my boyfriend on the nude beach I want to post. 

But, I’ll post it from his phone. And then I’ll check my likes and messages over the day. And then I’ll log back out and, by virtue of my Nokia, remain for a good stretch of time unaware of the goings-on of my other, virtual, mediated self. Maybe I’ll go for a walk, or read my book on the Eames chair. I might write a bit. I’ll, hopefully, better understand how the online sphere is a world that does have something to offer me, that can bridge a gap when I feel far away and distant from the people who know me best and make me feel the most myself; but also, how it’s a world that continues turning no matter how often I dip out of it, or for how long. And, finally, that it’s a world I like better the more I do dip out.