Share your digital minimalism thoughts/experiences/strategies!
I see a lot of people discussing how the internet used to be a place in the home, a family computer in the corner of a home office that you could walk away from and close the door to shielding yourself from the onslaught of constant novelty and needing to check things for "updates". Now, the firehose of information follows us everywhere, often to our detriment. Something similar that I haven't seen discussed: while already at the computer, basically everyone has a browser open constantly. As a result, there is almost no offline computer use, or even a clear online/offline distinction since so much software "calls home" or has some background internet connectivity. Thinking back to being a kid, I do think there was a browser open very frequently but not ALWAYS.
A while ago, I bought a netbook then installed nixos without a browser, intending for it to be a portable offline tool. As I found out, computers aren't actually that useful without internet (at least for me). Basically, it's good for word processing, which once upon a time was the "killer app" for personal computers. However, it's actually WORSE than a paper journal in my opinion because:
1) carrying it sucks (need a bigger bag, more weight)
2) I have to worry about battery life/charging
3) heat and fan noise
4) writing on a computer leads to worse memory recall
5) there's a temptation to try to organize things which is a distraction. With a paper notebook you just write at the next free space, there is no cognitive load from having to think about organization with directories/tags/document structure.
So personally what I'm trying to do to avoid browsers/the internet more is:
1) close my insane number of phone tabs (789 open tabs rn, my intentional crusade brought it down from ~2k, I'm better about this on my pc) (btw if you use Fennec, the only place to see # of open tabs once the tab counter starts displaying ∞ is in the "delete browsing data" menu in settings)
2) store things I will visit in the future offline (recipes, software docs (applications like Zeal?), buy physical books)
3) find alternative stim/novelty sources (rubiks cube, music, walking, books, art books, nintendo 3ds, etc) AND try making "menus" of them so I can go "I notice I am bored, time to look at THE ACTIVITY LIST". The "phone use is mostly a stim" perspective was very revealing and I got it from here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKjMn_elwlYRelated to the activity list idea, I intend to setup wmenu (sway dmenu) soon to have a similar thing on my pc where a key combo brings up a menu of activities like "play <game>, work on project 1, work on project 2, open zeal for rust docs, browse photos dir with sxiv, etc".
Lately, I've also been increasingly aware of the feeling of motivation/energy draining away as soon as I sit down on the couch and look at my phone while taking a break from working on something, which is SUPER IRRITATING because I think I'm GOOD at digital minimalism and self control relative to most people as I have no social media and go outside and such. I guess everyone struggles with it these days though, and noticing is a good first step.
I've recently got back into the habit of keeping my phone in reading mode (grayscale) and keeping sensors off (
https://www.howtogeek.com/691619/how-to-turn-off-all-your-android-phones-sensors-in-one-tap/) unless I want to use the camera
Anyways I have a ton of thoughts on this topic and will probably braindump more here and eventually add a more organized page to my WIP personal website (which I am conflicted about because I need a browser to work/view it, I tried using the gemini procotol (
https://geminiprotocol.net/) but lack of customization made it hard to be creative which was kinda the point).
Would love to hear other people's perspectives because I've only heard from, like, Cal Newport and a couple of lifestyle youtubers who don't exactly have a an incentive to be honest about their experiences.