7 Reasons Why You Should Embrace Digital Minimalism

Let me stop you right here right now. Read this before you send that email, look at that next message, post that backlog of ‘life updates’, or mindlessly scroll through social media to unwind from a busy day. ‘More’ is not synonymous with ‘better’.

#1. You learn to cultivate your own space.

An essential step in us preserving ourselves is to cultivate our own space. This necessarily implies that we need boundaries. Technology has made it easier for all sorts of strange things to creep into our personal time. The result: We’re angry, we’re agitated, and we don’t know how to stop. The treadmill of daily life keeps us chronically exhausted.

Don’t let the phone, or laptop, or whatever it is creep into your life. Tend to your personal space as if it were a newborn child.

#2. You realise deeply that not everything is ‘important’ as it seems.

Is there a ‘crisis’? A person needing our assistance ‘all the time’? Let me break things for you – 99.9% of what you say is ‘urgent’ simply isn’t.

Attend to the 0.1% of issues that are in fact urgent. For the rest of it all, let people be. More importantly, let people learn to deal with their own issues. How else are they to learn the art of independence?

#3. You learn how to cope with boredom.

Translation: Technology can be like a drug. Now, you’d cringe at tacking tablets all the time when you’re bored, wouldn’t you?

So why don’t we cringe when we pull out our phones all the damn time at coffee cues, before bed or in front of our loved ones.

Just stop it. Face boredom head on. You’ll discover interesting things about yourself when you do.

#4. You realise that the less you say, the more people listen to you.

When you’re active on social media all the time, people become sick of you. They block you out. You become a distant noise in the background.

Post less frequently, and people are far more interested in what you have to say. Why: Because they know that what you’re saying is important otherwise you wouldn’t be saying it.

Less is more.

#5. You understand that the less you make yourself available to others, the more they value your time.

Make yourself available to everyone all the time, and they will walk all over you.
Make yourself available to a few people at select times, and people will organise themselves around you.

Don’t bend over backwards for everyone. The only person that loses is you.

#6. Your attention focuses to the ‘now’.

You’re forced to be with yourself. You’re forced to find something to do. You’re forced to do something ‘now’.

Technology makes it easy to live vicariously through other people. It also makes it easier to imagine where else you could be if you weren’t in your current state. It keeps you ‘at work’ all the time, you being the busy bee working overtime that you are (maybe).

So cut the technology and cut the mind wandering. Learn to live in the ‘now’, not in the past of the future.

#7. You become more attuned to ‘reality’.

It’s immensely easy to think we’re living a bad life because someone else is travelling overseas, that we’re fat because we see pictures of skinny or toned people on the internet, that someone else is ‘getting ahead’ of us in the career ladder because they made their new promotion known to the world.

This is not ‘real’. For every ‘great’ post you see of someone, you don’t see the 99+ sh^t things they didn’t post.

Good things and bad things happen to everyone. Sometimes social media, the internet, technology, whatever, make us thing that everyone else’s lives are infused with great stuff all the time. This is wrong. It’s artificial. It ain’t real.

Learn what is real.