Kyle Labriola

Sometimes there are things that I know in my heart, I just…need them explained back to me.

It’s like I need to re-learn something that I already knew by having it taught or illustrated in a new way. Or maybe I know something, but I need the spark that’s going to actually push me to act upon it. Something to nudge me out of denial.

Digital Minimalism, by Cal Newport, is a book about minimizing your time with apps and online platforms that you feel are having a negative impact on your life. It is a collection of arguments, anecdotes, and research, as well as a pitch of an actual life practice called “digital minimalism.” Keeping your digital life trim and streamlined so that it isn’t distracting.

I’m always skeptical about anything in the genres of “self-help” or “life advice.” If you’re like me, you probably feel that way too. Is there anything more radioactive to bring up in conversation than something that sounds trendy and holier-than-thou?

And yes, there are moments in this book that feel a bit annoying or out-of-touch. There are moments that might make you bristle, or tempt you into raising a finger with list of caveats and counter-arguments. I felt that way too.

That said, I think it’s a great book. Or at least interesting to me. Maybe, more than any other reason, for being a lengthy illustration of plain common sense. Re-teaching things a lot of us already know in our hearts.

For example: Silicon Valley sucks, a lot of their products are detrimental to our lives, and we might as well be blunt about we can do about it.

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The book is written from an interesting perspective. Cal Newport, apparently, has almost no experience using social media.

So, right off the bat, this isn’t a book that is written from a “I was so addicted from Twitter and now I’m 5 months clean” point-of-view. It’s written more from an “I’m an outsider studying this field of research” point-of-view.

While I would’ve loved some personally relatable anecdotes, this approach doesn’t bother me. I think the internet is like any other field of study, and deserves to be examined from different vantage points. By the end of the book, I didn’t think his outsider stance had any significant impact on his research or his arguments. I didn’t dock this guy any points, even though he missed out on contracting Poster’s Disease on a toxic message board or whatever.

So what did he have to say? In the end, it wasn’t really a book that says “throw your iPhone into the ocean” and then vamps for 10 more chapters.

Instead, it takes its time laying out very specific, thorough, sympathetic arguments about how we should think about our technology use.

To put it simply, the advice proposed is something like this:

1. For every piece of technology, whether hardware or software, consider what its use is and what goals you have in using it.

2. Take note of how much time you spend using that technology each week, and if there are any negative impacts from it

3. Think about whether there are other methods, or other technologies, that you could use instead that would be more beneficial for accomplishing your goals

4. Make a list of the things you use that could possibly be removed or replaced

5. If you want to take a crack at “digital minimalism”, try removing the hardware/software from your life that you can do without, and stick to it for 30 days

6. At the end of the 30 days, reflect on your experience, and slowly re-introduce any of the ones you want to bring back, but be more mindful about how, why, and for how long you use them each week

To be honest, it sounded like too much effort to me. So I didn’t do the whole 30 day cold turkey thing.

Or, at least, I didn’t mean to…

Halfway through reading the book and reflecting on it, I decided that Twitter and Tumblr were two platforms I didn’t need in my daily life anymore. Twitter and Tumblr had been my go-to platforms for the past decade (not counting Discord, I guess), and were my preferred places for posting and scrolling. It would be safe to say that my entire process of going from adolescence to adulthood was done on those two platforms, as well as the arc of my whole fledgling “career” so far. I posted all my art on Twitter and Tumblr. They were how I found commission customers, new friends, and freelance opportunities. I got my current job via Twitter.

Now, if we’re being honest with ourselves, there are other external factors that dampened my mood on those two platforms in 2024. You know how it is. But all the more reason to try living without them I guess!

I had a plan. I didn’t think I could do cold turkey, so I decided I would…

1. Hide the apps from view on my phone

2. Log out of the platforms on my browser

3. Log back in on browser once a week, on Sunday, to check my notifications and quickly skim through my timeline. That way, I can catch up on what I missed.

This way, it wasn’t taking up much time or mental energy throughout the week.

When I first did it, it felt drastic. I felt an urge, an itch, to get back on and scroll my timeline. It felt really weird not to have it. I keep thinking “I should tweet about this” or “I’m missing out on all the people I follow.”

And then…after two weeks went by, I forgot to log back in on the third Sunday.

Then I forgot to log back in on the fourth Sunday.

The urge to check them was completely fading away, even though I had spent hours on them per day for like a decade and cultivated my whole “online life” there. The desire was just completely gone. To be fair, I had found soft-replacements for them in the form of things like Cohost and Bluesky, but even those I wasn’t scrolling as often because I don’t follow as many people there. They aren’t fire hoses of “content.”

On the rare occasion that I do log back in to Twitter or Tumblr, I’m immediately met with two things:

1. I don’t really have any unread notifs waiting for me anyway, because people aren’t engaging with my posts anymore. That could be for a bunch of reasons. Maybe because my new posts are so rare now, or they’re getting buried by everyone else’s posts, or I’m not showing up in their algorithms. Or maybe it’s because a chunk of my posts are linking to off-platform things, like this blog, and a lot of people don’t like going off-platform to read something. Or maybe I’ve just faded from people’s attention because I don’t post daily any more. Whatever the case is, there’s basically no “reward” for me posting things anymore because they don’t get the Likes and Shares that were fueling me before.

2. The platforms are just visually and mentally overwhelming to use, now. I’m not trying to be dramatic, like “y’know I don’t even LIKE the taste of sugar”, but I just don’t derive relaxation from looking at them anymore. There’s SO MANY POSTS. They’re, like, rushing by your dashboard every time you refresh, if you follow enough people. Especially if they’re sharing other people’s posts. I guess that was the whole point, right? That there’d be a bunch of new stuff on your screen every time you refreshed? That activity, which was once a selling point to me, is now the exact thing pushing me away. So much art, so much media, so many hot takes, so many arguments, so many thoughts. It’s simply too much to take in.

To be absolutely crystal clear: this is not “I’m so cool and enlightened because I’m not on Twitter and Tumblr anymore.”

This is, truthfully, “these platforms meant a lot to me for 10 years, and had more pros than cons for my routine back then, and now they don’t anymore.”

I’ve been trying to tell myself that that was one stage of my life, and I’m moving into the next stage now. It doesn’t mean it’s better or worse to use them. It doesn’t mean anyone who uses them is a fool, or anything like that.

But there is one thing that I think it does mean: it warrants a re-examination, for each of us individually, if these platforms are as useful and beneficial as they used to seem.

For you, the answer to that might be “Yes!” Or it might be “Not really.”

I don’t do commissions anymore. I don’t do fanart anymore. I’m not trying to build up my follower base anymore. I was hustling hard on Tumblr for a few years, pumping out art, watching the numbers go up, accumulating people who liked my stuff.

Someday, in the future, I might have to return to those things. And if that day comes…I might simply just start over from scratch, start over from 0 followers, and try to build the whole thing over again in a new way. But for now? That’s not a priority for me.

Are those platforms still the best way to express myself? Probably not. Are they still the best way to entertain me in my free time? Probably not. Are they still the best way to socialize with people and make new friends? Maybe, maybe not.

And thus, I accidentally cold-turkeyed for a month and here I am.

Newport’s book lays out a variety of suggestions of ways that people have reduced their technology use. Some people leave their phone at home when they go out to eat. Some people swap their smartphone for a flip phone (or tether the two, so they forward phone calls between them.) Some people give themselves new rules for Netflix binge watching, such as “no Netflix if you’re watching it by yourself.”

There’s other suggestions, probably along the lines of what you’d guess, such as “arrange times to talk to people on the phone” or “don’t leave Likes on people’s posts, reach out to them privately instead.”

If you read the book, you probably won’t agree with every single suggestion. I didn’t either. I think it’s something that everybody is going to feel differently about.

What matters, in my opinion, is simply that you DO think about it, draw your own lines, and make a conscious decision about what your routine is.

I’m not anti-technology, or anti-internet. I love the internet. It’s my favorite thing. It makes so much of how I live my life even possible. There is absolutely no world where I’m going to stop using my computer, or my smartphone, or stop posting things online to try to impress strangers.

I am, if I had to put a word on it, anti-”all the extra bullshit that got added to online life from around 2010 onward.”

I’m anti-”the way that digital life became grafted onto regular life in a way that didn’t feel separable anymore.”

I’m anti-”feeling like I can’t be alone with my thoughts, or live my life as a person, anymore.”

One of my favorite parts of the book discusses a topic called “solitude deprivation.” I wrote my thoughts on it already, giving it its own post. He defines “solitude” as the experience of being away from other human beings’ thoughts, so that you can be alone with your own thoughts. If you don’t go thirty minutes without a podcast, Youtube video, livestream, or audio book on…you’re not experiencing solitude.

(Like much of the book, he draws out the idea with a flowery example of Abraham Lincoln spending alone time in the woods, but I’m not really interested in hearing about “great men” who did "great things" because they didn’t get distracted by Reddit or whatever)

This really clicked for me. It’s always been a high priority, especially for my mental health, that I’m okay with being alone with myself and alone with my thoughts. It’s not something that I want to be kept away from. I want to be able to reflect on things, plan for the future, sort out of my feelings, and think deeply about things that are stressing me out. And, obviously, there are things online that are very good at distracting you from that.

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Digital Minimalism ended up being the third book in a sort of unintentional-trilogy of books I read recently, all orbiting around similar topics.

One was Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman, about how we envision and use our own time.

One was Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari, about the things in the world that are taking up our attention, and the negative impacts that has.

And now Digital Minimalism. Hopefully now I can start reading books on more interesting topics, lol.

None of these books are perfect, and none of them magically improved my life. But they did help in orienting my own thoughts on these topics and making me more aware of the things I have control over.

I don’t see me using the term “digital minimalist” to refer to myself, or anything trendy like that. But I do think the suggestions and guides given are useful. I’m glad it was written.

I’m not an outdoors-y person, so you’ll probably never be able to tear computers out of my grubby little hands. But what I do want is to make the internet return to the role it had in my life back in middle school and high school. It was an accessory to my life. The biggest accessory? Yeah. My favorite accessory? For sure. But it wasn’t embedded in my life on a molecular level. The internet was something I engaged with as an activity. I came home from school, sat in a particular room at a particular desktop, and “logged on” to do little activities that were fulfilling to me, and then I logged off.

What percentage of my current internet usage can I describe as “fulfilling”? How much of it can I even describe as “an activity”? These are the things that have slowly changed over the years, but have always been within my control to change back. There's nothing really stopping me from using the internet in that "middle school era" way again.

I know how we got here, just like you probably do. I know about the tech companies, I know about the attention economy, I know about selling data and about personalized ads. I know how the companies make their money, and the dark patterns they use to incentivize user behavior. I know what the promise of social media is, and what the reality of it is too.

I’ve known about it, I’ve complained about it, but I wasn’t really doing anything about it.

I’m trying, at least in small ways, to change my routine now.

Of course, I still watch Youtube videos when I should be working. And I anxiously click back-and-forth through Discord channels instead of scrolling Twitter. I take my phone with me everywhere, and I check it when I’m bored. I don’t think I’m going to make huge changes overnight about those things.

But if I can spend my leisure minutes doing crossword puzzles, playing video games, reading blog posts, and brainstorming story ideas? That’s at least one step up from scrolling my Twitter feed, in my opinion. Same for getting my news from actual journalists. And same for reaching out to friends and family to keep up with their lives, rather than just leaving Like on a photo and calling it a day.

It might even be better that I post stuff, like these blog posts, and get much less engagement now from them than I used to get on my fanart. I’m going back to where I made stuff purely for the joy and fulfillment of making it, rather than worrying about whether it would “do numbers.” I enjoy writing these posts, even if zero people were to read it.

None of these are novel ideas. They're not even interesting. It’s all very obvious, almost to the point that it’s trite. It's obvious to the point that saying it out loud is condescending. Believe me, I know how this whole post sounds.

But maybe I just needed to read a book that laid it all out to me in detail. And with a new spark of motivation, I can choose to re-craft my online experience into something that works for me.

Best case scenario, by 2026, I’ll be making fan sites on Neocities in obscurity. If you pass me by, give me a nod and know I'm finally living my best digital life.