I just finished reading “Digital Minimalism” by Cal Newport, and found it incredibly lacking. I think it’s because I expected something more aimed toward guiding people into decluttering or simplifying their digital lives, but instead it blathered on about how to reduce the size of your digital life altogether.
I know the latest trend is to abhor computers and digital life, and instead yearn for a secluded life herding goats in rocky pastures, but I still find that technology enriches my day-to-day life, and the online world is still a place filled with brilliant and charming people. But, there are problems with the way most people (myself included) connect with these digital worlds, and getting advice about how to effectively manage these problems would have been nice.
I don’t want to read advice books about avoiding a problem, I want to read advice books about dealing with a problem.
The book is a chaotic mess. It starts the way you would expect: talking about how technology from the late 90s and early 2000s was really great, but now companies use algorithms to get you addicted in order to show you an endless stream of ads. That’s not inaccurate, but I think it’s over-simplified, and I think we forget how crappy and user-hostile a lot of the older technology actually was.
The author then spends an incredible amount of time hyping up Henry David Thoreau and quoting from Walden, which is a favorite hobby of aspiring minimalists. I mean, I’m guilty as charged, I also adore Walden. But maybe this isn’t the place for that?
A couple chapters are focused on social media, despite the fact that the author has never actually used social media (a fact of which he is proud to tell you, and smugly reminds you about as often as he can). He encourages you to delete social media apps from your phone to figure out the ones you can’t live without, and then be mindful of how you use the social media networks you stay on. Multiple times throughout the book he highlights that you probably only get 10 minutes to an hour of actual value out of social media scrolling each week. That part is probably true.
He then spends an entire chapter trying to convince you to get non-digital hobbies, like reading books, taking walks, and picking up new home improvement projects. Sure, those are probably good things to do, but it doesn’t really help you minimize your digital footprint.
Another key piece of advice is how you should aim for deep conversations with people, right after the chapter titled “Spend Time Alone” in which he waxes longingly for solitude.
I think it’s also weird how he sprinkles in the most random product references, like the “Mouse Book Club”. I had never heard of the Mouse Book Club, but apparently it lets you subscribe to expensive, abridged versions of public domain books that you then keep in your pocket so you can read when you’re bored, rather than immediately reaching for your phone. Call me crazy, but I can achieve the same results for remarkably less just by using a dedicated ereader. And I don’t have to slog my way through abridged public domain books. I suppose if you wanted to avoid something digital you could also just as easily fall back to a cheap copy from a used book store. But then again, I have to ask: is this “digital minimalism,” or just “minimalism?”
In any case, this is not a book I especially enjoyed, nor one I would go out of my way to recommend. What kind of advice would I give if I were to write a book on digital minimalism? Stay tuned, that’s a future blog post.