On Mindful Technology Use

How do you feel about your relationship with digital technology?

Have you ever been mid-conversation with someone and reached for your phone? Have you ever been doing something productive on your computer, and then suddenly, you opened a new tab and typed in "youtube", or took out your phone to scroll Instagram, with no idea where the urge came from?

My goal in this article is to introduce the concept of Digital Minimalism and share some techniques that I use to moderate the role of digital technology in my life.

Beginnings

The summer before I began college (2019), I read a book by Cal Newport called Digital Minimalism. The core idea of the book is that using modern technology is not "good" or "bad", but rather that modern technology can improve or worsen our lives, and we should be extremely selective in what technology we allow into our personal lives and the conditions under which we use them.

I was 17 when I first read this book, but it immediately resonated with me. Growing up, I had an extremely positive view of digital technology. Any gadget that was the latest and greatest was just automatically cool to me. I had decided I would major in computer science at college - not just because I enjoyed programming, but like a lot of other CS students, I just thought working with technology was cool. However, even at the age of 17 back in 2019, I already had a love-hate relationship with my smartphone.

Throughout college, my relationship with and attitude towards digital technology changed quite a bit. I deleted my personal Instagram and replaced it with an account for my hobby, music production, but that account quickly just became a replacement for my original account - the main difference being that I was only 'following' people in my life I had real-life relationships with (with the exception of other producers / music artists and meme accounts).

The short-form explosion

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, TikTok, which was already gaining a lot of popularity in the U.S. in my age group, absolutely exploded. While I had already convinced myself to limit my social media use to a single platform, I effectively became a TikTok user when Instagram added their Reels feature in 2020.

The problem

My biggest problem with the way that digital technology use has impacted my life is my ability to concentrate, sit still, or do very basic things in my life. I've noticed that when I spend less time watching YouTube and scrolling short-form content, the more I'm able to just sit with myself, enjoy the company of others, start boring tasks (cleaning, laundry, etc.), and focus either at work or reading a book, watching a movie, etc.

Additionally, I just recognize that there's a limited amount of time in my life, and that time and my attention are truly my two most valuable resources. Using digital technologies mindlessly is a waste of these resources.

Crafting a protocol

Okay, so digital technology can be addictive, but what can we do about it? For me, ideal technology use in my perfect life is somewhere in between living in a cabin in the woods and spending 16 hours on a screen every day. Crafting a protocol for your technology can help you spend your time more wisely.

Note that in Digital Minimalism, Newport advocates for a "Digital Declutter", where you remove all "optional technologies" from your life for 30 days and then reintroduce them as you see fit. I think this is a great way for you to understand what technologies are truly necessary, and what technologies you're convincing yourself you "need".

If our goal after reading a book like Digital Minimalism is to use technology that improves our lives in moderation, than it seems obvious to me that there's just no place for TikTok or Reels in my life. I simply have never been able to watch a single TikTok or Instagram Reel without immediately wanting more, as if I have an itch and if I don't scratch it immediately my brain will explode.

At the time of writing this article, my complete operating system for digital technology use is as written below. I'll split my protocol into 3 sections:

  1. Alternative Activities
  2. My Phone
  3. My Computer

While crafting your protocol, I think the most important piece is deciding what you're going to do with the time you're not using time-sucking technologies.

Alternative activities

Read, work on fun computer science projects, clean / do household chores, play a video game or watch a movie, listen to a podcast, meditate, prepare food for the coming week, or sit in silence.

My Phone

Some people switch to a "dumb phone" - pretty much any phone that wouldn't be considered a smart phone. But if you have someone in your life who can lock you out of the "bad" features of your smartphone, you can turn your smartphone into a dumb phone and still retain important features (Google Maps, a great camera, music streaming app, etc.). If you decide to go this route, I'd recommend thinking long and hard about whether you really need each app that you have on your phone. Here's the protocol for my iPhone:

  • No social media apps (except for BeReal, which I spend < 5 minutes on every day)
  • No web browser or app store
    • I live with my girlfriend, so I had her set up Screen Time on my iPhone and lock me out of re-enabling safari or the App Store using a passcode that only she knows
    • I've found that living without a web browser on your phone is seriously not that bad and prevents you from constantly looking things up or finding things to feed your brain
  • Sometimes, I switch my phone to grayscale and turn on Night Shift 24/7 at the highest warmth setting. This makes my phone more boring to look at
  • I offloaded my entire photo library to my computer, with an extra backup on an external SSD just to be sure. My brain craves stimulation so badly that sometimes I'll open up my photo library and just scroll and look for something interesting like I'm on social media

My Computer

  • I have cleared and paused my watch history on YouTube, which prevents them from both showing recommended videos on my homepage and from generating better sidebar recommendations, as long as I keep my liked videos reasonably useless to the algorithm.
  • DF YouTube - a Firefox extension with variants on any major browser. It basically removes most of the distracting elements on youtube.com
  • Leechblock - a browser extension that allows you to create blacklists or whitelists of sites you are allowed to visit. I block the front page of Reddit at all times. It also allows you to set a timeout on certain sites, which I'll use to make sure I'm being extra intentional about. It also has a "lockdown" mode, which will temporarily lock down certain sites based on lists you can manage. I'll use this mode when I need to hunker down and do some work.
  • Normally, I will be signed out of iMessage on my Mac. Unfortunately this makes communication for freelance work that I occasionally do extremely inconvenient.

Is there a way for me to use a platform like Instagram reasonably? On a mobile device, probably no. But I have discovered a way to use Instagram in a relatively reasonable way on a computer.

  1. Download uBlock Origin (I use Firefox as my web browser)
  2. Open the extension on instagram.com while you are signed in and select the element picker icon
  3. Select elements you want to never see again. In my case, I selected the Reels tab and the explore tab. I also used the element picker to block all suggested posts, restoring my Instagram feed to something more like 2016-2017, where you can see photos and videos from people you follow, but not from anyone else.

YouTube: The Final Boss

If you've ever tried to quit social media and immediately found yourself spending more time on another addictive website, you're not alone. For me, whenever I used to quit Instagram, I'd end up spending a lot of that regained time on Reddit. Now, I don't spend almost any time on Reddit, but have a tough time staying off of YouTube.

Moving forward, I'm considering taking a significantly more hardcore break from YouTube. I'm hoping that YouTube is my "final boss" in my fight against addictive digital technologies.

Conclusion

Ultimately, digital minimalism is less about the specific protocol and more about using technology in away that maximizes good effects and minimizes bad effects. Using technology less in your life means absolutely nothing if you filled that regained time with other activities that you also don't care about or didn't mindfully choose to engage in.

If you decide to embrace digital minimalism and attempt to live a life where you're more mindful of your digital technology use, it's important to understand that your inclination to use addictive technologies isn't because you're weak-willed or irresponsible, but rather that companies have invested billions of dollars to figure out how to keep your eyes glued to a screen for as long as possible so that they can make more ad revenue.

While there are plenty of different reasons for adopting digital minimalism into your life, one might simply be that your time and attention are the two most valuable resources you have. Roman philosopher Seneca wrote extensively about the way we should use our time. After all, the way we spend our day is the way that we spend our lives. In his essay On the Shortness of Life addressed to his father-in-law, he writes:

"It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is — the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it."

For myself, my goal in embracing digital minimalism is to minimize the amount of times I end my day, climb in bed, and say "Where did the day go? I can't even remember how I spent my time". I encourage anyone who feels as if some of their time or attention has been taken from them to consider adopting digital minimalism.