9 ms·

On Digital Minimalism

166 points by 0x54MUR41 10y ago

huhtenberg 10y ago
> The modern minimalism movement ... ... is an oxymoron. It is plenty obvious from a quick scan of https://reddit.com/r/minimalism https://reddit.com/r/minimalism where they struggle with reconciling all different interpretations of minimalism on daily basis. For some it's asceticism, for others it's having just one Rolex instead of 10 Seikos. There's also a separate circus from the "Help, my SO wants to buy a 2nd fork!" variety. There's no single prominent movement, it's very much all over the place and to each his own.
- imgabe 10y ago
  The problem I had with /r/minimalism is that it's more focused on the aesthetic movement rather than the lifestyle movement. A 4,000sf house with sparse furniture and clean straight lines is minimalist in an aesthetic sense, but not really in the sense of owning only exactly what you need to do what you want and no more. The two meanings of minimalism seem to create a lot confusion and conflict about whether a given thing is "minimalist".
  - huhtenberg 10y ago
    > not really in the sense of owning only exactly what you need to do what you want and no more It's one and the same really. Once you have a bit more money the pragmatic live-in-a-shoebox minimalism tends to transform into the "aesthetic" variety - you still own a bare minimum that makes you happy, but you can now afford a better quality of the same. Be it a larger place or a more expensive pair of jeans.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      But a larger place is by definition not the bare minimum - you have more square footage than you need.
      - huhtenberg 10y ago
        For bare minimum you can sleep on a park bench :) "Need" is subjective and the rest follows from there.
- lamacase 10y ago
  From the article: >Minimalism is a lifestyle that helps people question what things add value to their lives. The movement involves reflecting on your personal values, so of course it's going to have almost as many expressions as there are people doing it.
  - matwood 10y ago
    I would add that it helps people not just to think about things adding value, but also add costs. It's the old Fight Club adage about "the things you own, own you", and "only when you have nothing, can you do anything." While it can be taken to the extreme, the underlying premise is true. Buy a new car and you're going to be worried about taking care of it. Buy a used car and you're a bit less worried b/c it already has some scratches. Don't buy a car at all, and you're never worried about the car (maybe how to get places if you don't live in a city...) The goal should be to only add things to your life where the value is more than the costs. One situation where people have huge differing opinions is kids. Kids probably cost more than anything else someone can obtain in life. They are expensive money wise, time wise, and emotionally, but for some the value is huge, and others not so much.
SuperPaintMan 10y ago
One of the hardest parts I've found in winnowing the amount of sheer information I process every day was my iPhone. I solved it by limiting my access to a few key apps, silencing non-critical notifications(Re: Email) and deleting Safari. Anything that I can access through a browser and check once a day (Here's looking at you Instagram) was locked out of my phone/removed. Downside: The Internet is no longer in my pocket and occasionally I am required to use 411 and call someone. Turned my iPhone into a almost-dumbphone using Configurator and have seen nothing but improvements to daily-life. > http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/10/hands-on-securing-ios-pwning-your-kids-with-apple-configurator-1-2/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/10/hands-on-securing-ios-p...
- matwood 10y ago
  That sounds more like an extreme way to deal with the lack of self discipline (deleting Safari??). If it works for you, great. For me minimalism is about how do I get what I need/want in the least amount of time and as little waste as possible. First was how to deal with news. I find the 5 minute NPR news briefing podcast from the latest hour is great. Honestly, news just does not change that much, so listening to that briefing once or twice a day is plenty. If I have more time that day, I'll also listen to WSJ tech or Planet Money podcasts. Next, the Google app on the iPhone does a great job at summarizing things I typically want to know about. I was using the Apple equivalent of this, but it simply does not know me like Google does (for better or worse). I can open the Google app and see the weather, traffic, etc..., scan it and go. For email, Inbox is configurable to only send alerts for certain classes of email. I get alerts only when they matter, and everything else can wait until I'm at a computer to check.
  - tonyedgecombe 10y ago
    "That sounds more like an extreme way to deal with the lack of self discipline" But the OP clearly doesn't have enough self discipline (or more likely spends it elsewhere), so perhaps it is a good idea.
  - BeetleB 10y ago
    >For me minimalism is about how do I get what I need/want in the least amount of time and as little waste as possible. That's not what minimalism is for most people. I want a lot of things. More than I have time for. Minimalism is about figuring out the marginal value each of those provides and eliminating all but the top x percent. It's about reducing the stuff you feel you need. Your approach sounds more like you are not doing that. >I find the 5 minute NPR news briefing podcast from the latest hour is great. Sorry for changing the topic, but as a former news junkie, I've long wanted to write a lengthy essay on how/why to read the news. If there is one thing I would want people to get out of that essay, it is that when it comes to news, the path of moderation is the one that will make you the most misinformed. There's so much misinformation out there that the only way I could get an idea of what was going on was to spend many hours a month reading up news from multiple sources, and potentially multiple analyses. Only then would you get a fuller picture. Any given single story was highly likely to be missing or misreporting key information. And certain stories would not be covered by some organizations but covered by others. By listening to a given news outlet, you have no idea what important stories are not being told. I did this for several years before calling it quits (too much time for not much personal value). But I knew from my past experience with dealing with people who only "scanned" the news (or listed to the news summary on BBC/NPR) that they tended to be quite misinformed. So the only option was to more or less quit altogether. Even then, a few months later, I found myself having opinions on current events. Why? Because I still randomly scanned newspaper headlines while walking or listened to NPR broadcasts while driving. I had become the misinformed person. The person who doesn't follow news altogether tends to be less misinformed. They are certainly ignorant, but they have fewer faulty notions. These days, have I really gone cold turkey? Not really. I do still read/listen to it. But I do it while refusing to draw any conclusions. Long story short: If you want to follow the news, either do it wholeheartedly or quit. No middle ground in this world.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
glaberficken 10y ago
I think the keyword here is "tool". Using a piece of software as a tool as opposed to the software using you.
- drdeadringer 10y ago
  Right. "What do I want to do? Here is the tool for me to do that."
miguelrochefort 10y ago
I'm obsessed with minimalism. I want all my possessions to fit inside my backpack. I own one pair of socks. I sleep on the floor. I still struggle with digital minimalism. The current state of software is unbelievably fragmented. I have literally created over 500 accounts in my life. I have more than 100 apps on my phone. This so-called software diversity makes my life miserable. I've been attempting to solve this problem for the past 10 years. I came to the conclusion that we need to create a single app that does 80% of things. Somehow, people still don't believe this is desirable or possible. I can't grasp why.
- 0xCMP 10y ago
  I agree, have been trying to attain this as well for the longest time.
- Davidp00 10y ago
  Being able to fit all my possessions in a backpack is something I think about. Can you go in to more detail on the stuff you own? In what kind of climate do you live in? It seems a lot easier to not have a lot of stuff when you don't have to have cloths for multiple seasons.
  - miguelrochefort 10y ago
    I have not reached that goal yet. I still own more things than I should. If you want inspiration, you can find it there: https://www.reddit.com/r/onebag/ https://www.reddit.com/r/onebag/ Here's a good example: http://tynan.com/gear2017 http://tynan.com/gear2017 I live in Canada, so it's not going to be as easy as if I lived in California.
  - throw9383412 10y ago
    I live in western Canada, a pair of long johns, jeans and a coat are enough to spend an hour in -25 °C. I own a few things that I don't mind getting rid of when I move like a snowboard and a mattress, otherwise my clothes + toiletries + laptop/phone is it.
- chickenfries 10y ago
jtcond13 10y ago
Do people feel that reading Hacker News meets these principles? On one hand there's a lot of good links and discussions here, but a significant portion is either too obscure or just not very interesting (e.g. most medium.com links). How do you optimize your HN reading to maximize time spent learning?
- jasonkostempski 10y ago
  I use an RSS reader and filter certain domains, medium.com being one of them :) Cuts way down on the noise and prevents rescanning over stuff I've already read or dismissed.
- ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
  Actually I use a habit tracking app, where one of the habits is "no news but HN". HN is an improvement compared to reading any other news source or various reddits.
ivan_ah 10y ago
A couple of years ago I was forced to buy a smartphone (to get into Android dev), but I didn't get a data plan. I've been very happy with this decision. Most of the useful mobile apps I use (transit/maps/email) work well enough offline, but I don't get any notifications or interruptions. I still struggle with internet addiction through my laptop, but at least the phone isn't adding to the problem.
adpoe 10y ago
I strongly agree with Cal on this. I write software and generally spend much of my time focusing on how to better design digital technologies of various kinds. But ultimately, I think that good design is typically subtractive, not additive. The best digital products improve our lives--our lives in the physical world--while sucking up as little of our attention, mental effort, and personal information as possible. I think it's only a matter of time before we see these attitudes become more prevalent (precisely because they are controversial/reactionary), and the general design ethos of Silicon Valley shifts as a result. One of the key tensions of the near future may be between minimalism and maximalism in this way: should we throw more and more computation power at every single "problem", brute-forcing a solution to each for its own sake? Or should we optimize, and find the smallest, least intrusive, most elegant and simplest solution? I know which one sounds better to me. But will that drive business revenue? We'll see. Perhaps more importantly though, at a certain point--by creating so much digital detritus and complexity, our brute-force solutions and ever-present computation create a new set of problems (such as the need to filter information aggressively to get any useful value from it--which is what minimalism is all about). So maybe this is just the realization of that. We need a new layer on top of the computation infrastructure to __reduce__, to complete our maximalist designs. Either way, interesting.
- SmkyMt 10y ago
  "The best digital products improve our lives..." I'd like to be as optimistic as you. But actually (sadly?) this already happens. Those who want to "improve" their lives at profit-from-advertising are running A-B tests to evaluate the "best"-ness of their design/development based on clicks, ad revenue, conversions etc. Those who wish to promote a political or religious viewpoint ...same. You may not ever want to have your life "improved" in the way I choose to "improve" mine. There will be some digital technologies that leave the Facebook crowd feeling that they have better lives and others that do so for more niche markets (HN, anyone?).
- dominotw 10y ago
  >e. The best digital products improve our lives--our lives in the physical world--while sucking up as little of our attention, So glad the 'wearables revolution' is now relegated to dusty bottom shelves of target. Next on the chopping block is 'internet of shit', utility drones.
xkarga00 10y ago
I ditched Facebook two years ago for all the principles stated in the article (among other reasons) and I have never looked back. I am literately a healthier person ever since. Minimalism is a way of life, having to think about or deal with less things or situations helps me handle those better. Great article. Edit: One nit, the author mentions Orwell to describe today's social media. I would say it's more like what Aldous Huxley described in Brave New World and Neil Postman embodied in Amusing Ourselves To Death rather than an Orwellian world.
vinay427 10y ago
> GPS helped solve a problem that existed for a long time before it came along (how do I get where I want to go?), so did Google (how do I find this piece of information I need?). Snapchat, by contrast, did not. Be wary of tools in this latter category as they tend to exist mainly to create addictive new behaviors that support ad sales. I agree, in the case of Snapchat, but I don't see this as a very convincing argument that tools that solve new problems should induce caution because of potentially addictive behaviors. It seems like the author is using a few choice examples to make an assertion when perhaps a better argument (that I am hoping someone can provide) could be made.
- andrewfong 10y ago
  I think the larger point is that if you didn't perceive the problem as a problem before the tool existed, it might not actually be a problem. This is applicable outside of Internet technology too (e.g. fashionable clothing solves the problem of not being fashionable, but they also create the problem in the first place).
- GuiA 10y ago
  The "problem" Snapchat solves is "I want to feel close to my loved ones when we're not in the same room", which is just as much of a human need as "how do i get where i want to go", if not more so. Silly argument from the author.
csense 10y ago
I ditched Facebook back in 2008, and haven't regretted that decision since.

166 points by 0x54MUR41 10y ago

> The modern minimalism movement ... ... is an oxymoron. It is plenty obvious from a quick scan of https://reddit.com/r/minimalism https://reddit.com/r/minimalism where they struggle with reconciling all different interpretations of minimalism on daily basis. For some it's asceticism, for others it's having just one Rolex instead of 10 Seikos. There's also a separate circus from the "Help, my SO wants to buy a 2nd fork!" variety. There's no single prominent movement, it's very much all over the place and to each his own.

imgabe 10y ago
The problem I had with /r/minimalism is that it's more focused on the aesthetic movement rather than the lifestyle movement. A 4,000sf house with sparse furniture and clean straight lines is minimalist in an aesthetic sense, but not really in the sense of owning only exactly what you need to do what you want and no more. The two meanings of minimalism seem to create a lot confusion and conflict about whether a given thing is "minimalist".
- huhtenberg 10y ago
  > not really in the sense of owning only exactly what you need to do what you want and no more It's one and the same really. Once you have a bit more money the pragmatic live-in-a-shoebox minimalism tends to transform into the "aesthetic" variety - you still own a bare minimum that makes you happy, but you can now afford a better quality of the same. Be it a larger place or a more expensive pair of jeans.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    But a larger place is by definition not the bare minimum - you have more square footage than you need.
    - huhtenberg 10y ago
      For bare minimum you can sleep on a park bench :) "Need" is subjective and the rest follows from there.
lamacase 10y ago
From the article: >Minimalism is a lifestyle that helps people question what things add value to their lives. The movement involves reflecting on your personal values, so of course it's going to have almost as many expressions as there are people doing it.
- matwood 10y ago
  I would add that it helps people not just to think about things adding value, but also add costs. It's the old Fight Club adage about "the things you own, own you", and "only when you have nothing, can you do anything." While it can be taken to the extreme, the underlying premise is true. Buy a new car and you're going to be worried about taking care of it. Buy a used car and you're a bit less worried b/c it already has some scratches. Don't buy a car at all, and you're never worried about the car (maybe how to get places if you don't live in a city...) The goal should be to only add things to your life where the value is more than the costs. One situation where people have huge differing opinions is kids. Kids probably cost more than anything else someone can obtain in life. They are expensive money wise, time wise, and emotionally, but for some the value is huge, and others not so much.

SuperPaintMan 10y ago

One of the hardest parts I've found in winnowing the amount of sheer information I process every day was my iPhone. I solved it by limiting my access to a few key apps, silencing non-critical notifications(Re: Email) and deleting Safari. Anything that I can access through a browser and check once a day (Here's looking at you Instagram) was locked out of my phone/removed. Downside: The Internet is no longer in my pocket and occasionally I am required to use 411 and call someone. Turned my iPhone into a almost-dumbphone using Configurator and have seen nothing but improvements to daily-life. > http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/10/hands-on-securing-ios-pwning-your-kids-with-apple-configurator-1-2/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/10/hands-on-securing-ios-p...

matwood 10y ago
That sounds more like an extreme way to deal with the lack of self discipline (deleting Safari??). If it works for you, great. For me minimalism is about how do I get what I need/want in the least amount of time and as little waste as possible. First was how to deal with news. I find the 5 minute NPR news briefing podcast from the latest hour is great. Honestly, news just does not change that much, so listening to that briefing once or twice a day is plenty. If I have more time that day, I'll also listen to WSJ tech or Planet Money podcasts. Next, the Google app on the iPhone does a great job at summarizing things I typically want to know about. I was using the Apple equivalent of this, but it simply does not know me like Google does (for better or worse). I can open the Google app and see the weather, traffic, etc..., scan it and go. For email, Inbox is configurable to only send alerts for certain classes of email. I get alerts only when they matter, and everything else can wait until I'm at a computer to check.
- tonyedgecombe 10y ago
  "That sounds more like an extreme way to deal with the lack of self discipline" But the OP clearly doesn't have enough self discipline (or more likely spends it elsewhere), so perhaps it is a good idea.
- BeetleB 10y ago
  >For me minimalism is about how do I get what I need/want in the least amount of time and as little waste as possible. That's not what minimalism is for most people. I want a lot of things. More than I have time for. Minimalism is about figuring out the marginal value each of those provides and eliminating all but the top x percent. It's about reducing the stuff you feel you need. Your approach sounds more like you are not doing that. >I find the 5 minute NPR news briefing podcast from the latest hour is great. Sorry for changing the topic, but as a former news junkie, I've long wanted to write a lengthy essay on how/why to read the news. If there is one thing I would want people to get out of that essay, it is that when it comes to news, the path of moderation is the one that will make you the most misinformed. There's so much misinformation out there that the only way I could get an idea of what was going on was to spend many hours a month reading up news from multiple sources, and potentially multiple analyses. Only then would you get a fuller picture. Any given single story was highly likely to be missing or misreporting key information. And certain stories would not be covered by some organizations but covered by others. By listening to a given news outlet, you have no idea what important stories are not being told. I did this for several years before calling it quits (too much time for not much personal value). But I knew from my past experience with dealing with people who only "scanned" the news (or listed to the news summary on BBC/NPR) that they tended to be quite misinformed. So the only option was to more or less quit altogether. Even then, a few months later, I found myself having opinions on current events. Why? Because I still randomly scanned newspaper headlines while walking or listened to NPR broadcasts while driving. I had become the misinformed person. The person who doesn't follow news altogether tends to be less misinformed. They are certainly ignorant, but they have fewer faulty notions. These days, have I really gone cold turkey? Not really. I do still read/listen to it. But I do it while refusing to draw any conclusions. Long story short: If you want to follow the news, either do it wholeheartedly or quit. No middle ground in this world.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

glaberficken 10y ago

I think the keyword here is "tool". Using a piece of software as a tool as opposed to the software using you.

drdeadringer 10y ago
Right. "What do I want to do? Here is the tool for me to do that."

miguelrochefort 10y ago

I'm obsessed with minimalism. I want all my possessions to fit inside my backpack. I own one pair of socks. I sleep on the floor. I still struggle with digital minimalism. The current state of software is unbelievably fragmented. I have literally created over 500 accounts in my life. I have more than 100 apps on my phone. This so-called software diversity makes my life miserable. I've been attempting to solve this problem for the past 10 years. I came to the conclusion that we need to create a single app that does 80% of things. Somehow, people still don't believe this is desirable or possible. I can't grasp why.

0xCMP 10y ago
I agree, have been trying to attain this as well for the longest time.
Davidp00 10y ago
Being able to fit all my possessions in a backpack is something I think about. Can you go in to more detail on the stuff you own? In what kind of climate do you live in? It seems a lot easier to not have a lot of stuff when you don't have to have cloths for multiple seasons.
- miguelrochefort 10y ago
  I have not reached that goal yet. I still own more things than I should. If you want inspiration, you can find it there: https://www.reddit.com/r/onebag/ https://www.reddit.com/r/onebag/ Here's a good example: http://tynan.com/gear2017 http://tynan.com/gear2017 I live in Canada, so it's not going to be as easy as if I lived in California.
- throw9383412 10y ago
  I live in western Canada, a pair of long johns, jeans and a coat are enough to spend an hour in -25 °C. I own a few things that I don't mind getting rid of when I move like a snowboard and a mattress, otherwise my clothes + toiletries + laptop/phone is it.
chickenfries 10y ago

jtcond13 10y ago

Do people feel that reading Hacker News meets these principles? On one hand there's a lot of good links and discussions here, but a significant portion is either too obscure or just not very interesting (e.g. most medium.com links). How do you optimize your HN reading to maximize time spent learning?

jasonkostempski 10y ago
I use an RSS reader and filter certain domains, medium.com being one of them :) Cuts way down on the noise and prevents rescanning over stuff I've already read or dismissed.
ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
Actually I use a habit tracking app, where one of the habits is "no news but HN". HN is an improvement compared to reading any other news source or various reddits.

ivan_ah 10y ago

A couple of years ago I was forced to buy a smartphone (to get into Android dev), but I didn't get a data plan. I've been very happy with this decision. Most of the useful mobile apps I use (transit/maps/email) work well enough offline, but I don't get any notifications or interruptions. I still struggle with internet addiction through my laptop, but at least the phone isn't adding to the problem.

adpoe 10y ago

I strongly agree with Cal on this. I write software and generally spend much of my time focusing on how to better design digital technologies of various kinds. But ultimately, I think that good design is typically subtractive, not additive. The best digital products improve our lives--our lives in the physical world--while sucking up as little of our attention, mental effort, and personal information as possible. I think it's only a matter of time before we see these attitudes become more prevalent (precisely because they are controversial/reactionary), and the general design ethos of Silicon Valley shifts as a result. One of the key tensions of the near future may be between minimalism and maximalism in this way: should we throw more and more computation power at every single "problem", brute-forcing a solution to each for its own sake? Or should we optimize, and find the smallest, least intrusive, most elegant and simplest solution? I know which one sounds better to me. But will that drive business revenue? We'll see. Perhaps more importantly though, at a certain point--by creating so much digital detritus and complexity, our brute-force solutions and ever-present computation create a new set of problems (such as the need to filter information aggressively to get any useful value from it--which is what minimalism is all about). So maybe this is just the realization of that. We need a new layer on top of the computation infrastructure to __reduce__, to complete our maximalist designs. Either way, interesting.

SmkyMt 10y ago
"The best digital products improve our lives..." I'd like to be as optimistic as you. But actually (sadly?) this already happens. Those who want to "improve" their lives at profit-from-advertising are running A-B tests to evaluate the "best"-ness of their design/development based on clicks, ad revenue, conversions etc. Those who wish to promote a political or religious viewpoint ...same. You may not ever want to have your life "improved" in the way I choose to "improve" mine. There will be some digital technologies that leave the Facebook crowd feeling that they have better lives and others that do so for more niche markets (HN, anyone?).
dominotw 10y ago
>e. The best digital products improve our lives--our lives in the physical world--while sucking up as little of our attention, So glad the 'wearables revolution' is now relegated to dusty bottom shelves of target. Next on the chopping block is 'internet of shit', utility drones.

xkarga00 10y ago

I ditched Facebook two years ago for all the principles stated in the article (among other reasons) and I have never looked back. I am literately a healthier person ever since. Minimalism is a way of life, having to think about or deal with less things or situations helps me handle those better. Great article. Edit: One nit, the author mentions Orwell to describe today's social media. I would say it's more like what Aldous Huxley described in Brave New World and Neil Postman embodied in Amusing Ourselves To Death rather than an Orwellian world.

vinay427 10y ago

> GPS helped solve a problem that existed for a long time before it came along (how do I get where I want to go?), so did Google (how do I find this piece of information I need?). Snapchat, by contrast, did not. Be wary of tools in this latter category as they tend to exist mainly to create addictive new behaviors that support ad sales. I agree, in the case of Snapchat, but I don't see this as a very convincing argument that tools that solve new problems should induce caution because of potentially addictive behaviors. It seems like the author is using a few choice examples to make an assertion when perhaps a better argument (that I am hoping someone can provide) could be made.

andrewfong 10y ago
I think the larger point is that if you didn't perceive the problem as a problem before the tool existed, it might not actually be a problem. This is applicable outside of Internet technology too (e.g. fashionable clothing solves the problem of not being fashionable, but they also create the problem in the first place).
GuiA 10y ago
The "problem" Snapchat solves is "I want to feel close to my loved ones when we're not in the same room", which is just as much of a human need as "how do i get where i want to go", if not more so. Silly argument from the author.

csense 10y ago

I ditched Facebook back in 2008, and haven't regretted that decision since.