Digital vs. Physical Minimalism

This article is unfinished.

The idea that you should not place excessive time and attention on material possessions is a not new, but over the past few years the Minimalist philosophy has become more and more prominent in the public eye. Copious amounts of YouTube videos, blog posts, and Reddit threads have been made on the topic by creators touting methodologies and practices that purport to reduce the clutter in your home, increase your productivity, and even maximize your cognitive abilities. While it's experiencing a surge in popularity right now, Minimalism is as old as the hills – but what is not as old as the hills are the phones that we all now have in our pockets. I'm not sure exactly when smartphones became ubiquitous (my parents managed to hold out getting theirs till mid-2015), but what is certain is that we are all incredibly connected to the outside world through the multiple devices most of us maintain and use every day.

This connectivity has many perks. We are able to maintain contact with friends and family no matter the distance, index the world’s collection of data on a whim, or see what is transpiring all over the globe any second of the day. For anyone who works from home, the connectivity granted by your phone, computer, or tablet allows you to provide value to society from the comfort of your own dwelling. These devices also provide an inexhaustible source of entertainment through innumerable outlets, with interminably growing mountains of content at your fingertips. In any first-world country in 2025, computers and computing technology are probably either the centerpiece of your work life, a key piece in orchestrating your social life, or a portal through which you entertain yourself in your personal life.

Despite all these benefits, we are already seeing detriments to this way of living. Constant connectivity has forced the workday longer and longer for some, with bosses more likely to be on employees' cases after work hours. The universality of email has created an endless task for all of us, clearing out your digital mailbox on the daily or risk becoming buried by discount codes and special offers and risk missing the one important email from a colleague among hundreds of newsletters you used to find interesting but now ignore until you have to delete them because you're too lazy to hit the unsubscribe button. As a knowledge worker or student, having constant internet access at your work means that at any point in time during the day you are two or three clicks away from stopping your work and checking your portfolio, looking at the news, or watching YouTube. The rise of short-form content threatens to obliterate our attentions spans, a threat that is especially perilous to the younger generations who are growing up having access to this technology during their most formative years. We become more likely to move towards low-hanging fruit when entertaining ourselves - reading a book requires cognitive effort, and therefore is always going to lose to a YouTube video when you are looking for something to do.

These are real and nontrivial downsides, but despite all of us knowing about them, the warnings that "short form content = bad!" are so common that they've become trite. There are several practices and philosophies that attempt to address the issue, but one that has been adopted enthusiastically and championed by many as the key to recovering their attention span is "Digital Minimalism". This philosophy, which was devised, publicized, and popularized by Cal Newport lays out a framework for organizing your life in a way that avoids interaction with your smartphone, computer, and digital technologies unless it is unavoidable. This philosophy of Digital Minimalism, described in a book by the same name, follows a few central tenets, like the idea that Clutter is Costly ( a myriad of digital tools is also a myriad of distractions waiting to happen), Optimization is Important (deciding how a digital tool is used is as important as whether or not to use a tool), and Intentionality is Satisfying (the more controlled you are with how you use the digital tools at your disposal, the happier you will be).

If you are in the self-improvement space, or online at all, you will probably have heard ad nauseum of both the Minimalism movement and the Digital Minimalism movement. And if you’re like me, you may have felt compelled by arguments on both sides, and strived to cut down both on your physical possessions and your usage of digital tools. At the start of this process, everything is great - seeing reductions in the amount of junk you have laying around is extremely satisfying, and the concentration benefits and extra time of day gained from reducing screen time and cutting down on short-form content consumption is tangible and motivating. However, after a certain point, Digital Minimalism and Physical Minimalism converge, and you start having to make decisions on which is more important, which is the topic I hope to address in the following sections.

DIGITAL VS PHYSICAL CLUTTER – WHICH IS MORE IMPORTANT TO ELIMINATE?

Mid-2023, following the advice of some self-improvement guru, I bought an alarm clock to put on my bedstand. The theory behind it was that if you used your phone alarm to wake up every day, by necessity your first action of the day is to grab your phone to turn off your alarm. This puts you in a precarious position- it’s early in the morning, you probably don’t want to get up, and you have a distraction device in your hand, begging for your attention to start the day off right with a doom scroll. Thus, it’s much safer to have a regular old alarm clock next to your bed, allowing you to put your phone somewhere else to charge while you got your z’s. Having your phone outside of the room has the added benefit of preventing you from grabbing your phone off your bedstand before you go to bed, ruining your melatonin production with blue light and keeping you up with scrolling. So, I got the alarm clock, and it worked great - for a time. Eventually it was time for me to go off to college, and I kicked my room declutter into gear. Everything I owned came under scrutiny as I rifled through all my possessions, and eventually I got to my alarm clock. That simple clock is what planted this complex question in my head, the question of Digital versus Physical minimalism. I had gotten rid of a huge amount of the clutter in my room, but this alarm clock occupied a special sort of niche, and as I continued to try and cut down on my stuff before I had to haul everything to campus that niche grew into a category, and the question grew more prominent in my mind. The alarm clock was a physical object, something that I had to take care of, make sure I didn’t drop on the floor, something that I had to replace the batteries in and make sure was set to the correct time each night and reset whenever its time got out of sync with my iPhone. On the other hand, it granted me a non-trivial amount of freedom from my phone in the evenings and mornings, something that I sought after on my campus where everything from getting food in my dining hall to unlocking my dorm room was controlled via phone. It also looked good on my shelf, but that’s another discussion.

The alarm clock was what planted the question in my mind, but what ended up being the greatest source of tension when I was making the decision between digital and physical minimalism ended up being media. Over high school I generated a copious number of sketches, drawings, and paintings, and acquired a large number of books and vinyl records and a turntable that I got for $20 in shockingly good condition from Goodwill. These things all brought me joy, and I derived significant satisfaction from being able to pick up my vinyl records, look at their tiny grooves under a magnifying glass, and fix my crappy turntable when it broke (which it frequently did). Watching records spin on the turntable was almost as enjoyable as listening to the music on them. All this time, I also had a Spotify premium subscription, but listening to music via streaming just didn’t feel the same as owning the music I was listening to (and compression made a difference in sound quality between the streaming service and the lossless audio from the turntable, but that’s a different issue). And I know it’s snobby, but picking up and hefting a physical book just feels so much more satisfying to me than downloading a pdf onto my paper tablet and reading it that way. What made the issue so pressing to me was that the end result of the two activities was fundamentally the same: reading a physical book and reading the same book as a pdf are really the same activity, which meant what I had to decide between was the convenience and physical minimalism of a digital copy, and the satisfaction, reliability (if my tablet broke all my digital books would be toast), and digital minimalism of having a paper copy. My art presented the same set of difficulties; I could either keep the enormous portfolio of every piece I’ve done, or I could make high-quality scans of them and keep them all on a thumb drive that could fit in my pocket.

All of these pressing issues descended upon me as I prepared to pack up my bedroom for my freshman fall semester, and I didn’t come to a satisfying conclusion before I had to throw what I could in a bin and ship myself off to college for orientation. Currently it’s summer, I’m a rising sophomore, and during freshman year I incrementally developed a set of principles that I now use to decide between these issues. However, they don’t fit into either the category of Physical or Digital minimalism, so I propose a third category: Attentional Minimalism.

Theory – Attentional Minimalism – Encompasses both digital and physical minimalism’s core drivers. The “Objects” you choose to interact with – these could be either literal physical things or digital objects such as websites or applications – should be optimized in such a way as to minimize your dependence on them and maximize your productivity gains from them. Both digital and physical minimalism ultimately draw on the same core ideals, which both are encompassed by attentional minimalism.

. . .

. . . . Unfortunately, I haven't finished this article and probably never will. I wrote the whole draft on a flight and once I got off I completely forgot about it, so hopefully someone else finds this and is inspired by it. Either way, it's out of my hands now. . .