My Massive Minimalist Mistake
Several years into embracing minimalism, I realise that I have been making one crucial mistake.
I have conflated minimalism with efficiency and productivity, and swapped physical clutter for digital clutter as a result. Is this another one of those articles bemoaning modern technology and its hijacking of our attention spans, clarity and mental wellbeing? Well, yes.
Didn’t I already write one of those? Also yes.
But even as someone who thinks about this stuff a lot, I completely sleepwalked into this one.
Let me explain.
When I embraced minimalism, everything in my life changed for the better. Here’s a longer read about why:
When I decluttered, I was able to combine shelves of books into one easy eReader. I could even get rid of that eventually because I had an app on my phone.
When I decluttered, I didn’t need to keep a notepad, or even be sat at my laptop to be able to write. I have an excellent note taking app on my phone.
When I decluttered, I didn’t need my camera or audio recorder to capture an idea for a music composition. I just need to whip out my phone and that’ll do that job.
When I decluttered, I didn’t need a million different ways of keeping in touch with different people in my life. I have a single Messaging platform that I use to keep in contact with those I speak to regularly. It’s an app. On my phone.
You get the point.
I had inadvertedly concentrated my entire attention span onto a device that had rendered me completely dependent on it.
It’s here where I can see I’ve made a bit of a misstep.
This isn’t minimalism. This isn’t bringing less into my life. It’s just an exchange of one form of clutter for another. I can see now that this approach was actually productivity disguised as minimalism.
I thought I was saving time from owning and maintaining less, but all of that time and attention was instead sucked right back into that little glowing screen. A zero sum game. If anything, it made some things worse:
- Waking up to a brand new day? Phone.
- Washing up? Phone.
- Stood waiting to collect my daughter from school? Phone.
- Cooking an evening meal? Phone.
- Talking to loved one for a finite amount of time that I’ll never get back in the one precious life we’ve been given? Phone.
In my desire to declutter my space and physical possessions, I had cluttered my mind.
Did I really embrace minimalism to be this inattentive? To not notice the little things? To not be present with the people I care most about in the world? To not look up and care?
After reading Cal Newport’s excellent Digital Minimalism, I made a number of changes such as turning my device greyscale, uninstalling all browsers, and limiting my screen time. The detox worked. Until I slowly dwindled back into old habits.
Like a diet revolving around a place of deprivation, I wasn’t able to make a long term impact from this single act of change.
By concentrating so many of my tasks — even intentional, ‘productive’ ones — into one place, I allowed my relationship with this thing to slowly eke back into a place of mind-numbing inertia. With idle screen time being how I spent too much of my precious time.
This is the opposite of my values. If this is what it means to be fast and efficient in your life, then count me out of the productivity game.
This article is me calling myself out on it, and serving as a reminder to me that minimalism is not some one and done thing. It’s not only getting rid of what you can see. It’s not some strategy to inject efficiency into every facet of your day.
It’s a process of constant re-evaluation and introspection. Of questioning how less can bring you more, both in ways you can see and ways that you can’t. Yet.
