Digital Minimalism is Analog Maximalism ♦ February 9, 2025
The smartphone is a device that does everything, that’s why people like it, right? On a phone one can take pictures, listen to music, record music, play games, take notes, keep a calendar, browse the internet, and much much more. These days the smartphone feels like an overlay draped onto everyday life. Many people pay at registers with their smartphones, and many restaurants trashed their paper menus in favor of QR codes. Our smartphones have become the interface for social interaction, not only on social media, but other core communication channels like iMessage, Face Time, and dating apps. We have left the fate of our social lives in the hands of app developers and user interface designers. In UI and UX design, creating user inputs means deciding the choices that users can make.
I beat the smartphone. It’s a tool that won’t help me through this stage of my life and I have no desire to own one in the near future. I think scrolling for the last 15 years fucked with my head, with a significant shift in 2020. In the last 2 years, I noticed my inability to develop my own taste for things, and I felt like I wasn’t generating any innovative ideas. It’s almost embarrassing to admit, and it might just be self-loathing; maybe I’m looking for something to blame for my lack of creative output, or I’m looking for an excuse to buy new tech toys. Using the smartphone for over a decade promoted a passive relationship to my screentime. I would turn on my phone without any idea of what to do, and I would end up scrolling. I allowed this mindlessness to consume me daily for several years.
I’m using the lightphone (I’m going to standardize this way of typing it because it’s easiest, but I’m referring to the Light Phone 2) as my daily phone 9 months and have no complaints at all. This device fundamentally changed my passive relationship to technology. Now, when I want to do anything that isn’t texting or calling, I have to use the perfect tool for the job. When I want to take a photo, instead of opening my phone, I turn on my camera. When I want to use the internet, I turn on my computer. When I want to listen to music, I break out the audio player. Somehow I got into the terrible habit of scrolling while listening to music on my phone. I would rather devote my full attention to music, and I was struggling. At first I thought I was addicted to social media, but I deleted the apps and started doomscrolling Wikipedia. I was addicted to the device, and no amount of will power was changing that. The smartphone had to go.
I own and use a lot of things. I am not a minimalist. I have more devices than an average tech enthusiast because "minimalism" is a core design principle in modern tech development. “Digital minimalism” is about reducing and eliminating the time I spend using technology in a way that does not enrich my life. Scrolling is the big one here. It is easy to spend hours a day scrolling and not retain a single second of it. I see “analog maximalism” as a result of this because I need other physical objects to fill the gaps in my less digital life. This often means reverting to tools people find obsolete like music players and word processors. These “obsolete” technologies take new forms in the digital age. My music player can take a 2TB SD card loaded with lossless audio. My word processor connects to wireless keyboards using a 2.4Ghz dongle, takes an SD card, and it can sync to Google Drive. The device I refer to as a “gameboy” is actually a single-board Linux computer that runs emulators. On this gaming handheld, I can play anything from the first Atari, and all the way up to the first Playstation and GameBoy Advance games, all on an SD card.
The SD card is the evolution of cartridge technology, using pin-connectors to transfer information to a device. Nintendo once used carriages, then adopted optical media in the 2000s, and now uses a proprietary SD card format for the Nintendo Switch. While “SD” literally means “secure digital”, I think in the age of cloud storage, physical flash memory is philosophically analog. Similar to CDs, I think they are the bridge between physical and digital media. I have the physical item I can share with my friends, or I can put it in my computer and copy the digital files to use as I wish.
Unsubscribed from Spotify, I’m focusing on building out a CD collection. I used to make mixes all the time, and I’m getting back into it. Buying CDs and tapes off of Bandcamp is the best way we can support musicians in an age where artists are coerced to upload their music to streaming services that pay them fractions of a cent per listen. I think the expericence of popping a CD into a stereo and reading the liner notes while music fills your space is worth paying for. CDs are rather affordable. Instead of paying $11.99 (and rising) a month for the rest of your life, you could buy one new CD or a few used ones. Listening to physical music cultivates intentional listening habits, and you are less likely to space out or do something else while you are engaging with music.
As for gaming, I have changed my tune on the need to own physical games. You can still lend games to your friend and sell them on the second-hand market, but that market is insanely expensive. Older games are now hot collectors items, and physical releases of new games are limited, if a game gets a disc release at all. This creates scarcity in the market, so new physical games hold their value. However, unlike older games, many new games require some kind of online connectivity to run properly. Often, the full game is not released on the disc, and requires a day-one patch to function. Worst of all, many online games with single player modes still require connecting to servers. I still think it is important to preserve new video games, but developers and publishers make it near impossible to create backups of new games in an attempt to stop piracy. I'm perfectly comfortable copying retro games onto an SD card and emulating them on a handheld or PC. If publishers no longer support a game or make it available to purchase, I will download it without guilt.
I think the least superfluous change to my use of technology is the way I use Google Maps to navigate my city. While the lightphone has a directions tool, it isn't something I like to rely on. It is very clunky and I have a hard time using it to orient myself. When I plan to go somewhere unfamiliar, I spend my morning plotting my route on the computer. I pull up Google Maps (seeking Google alternatives, reach out with suggestions) on my desktop computer and take screenshots of maps. I print out these screenshots and take hand-written notes on the page. When I get lost (I do get lost), I talk to fellow pedestrians to help me get back on track.
The life I'm describing, shopping for music and buying other tech, isn't the cheapest up front. But when you consider how much money someone spends on streaming per month, buying a new phone every year, and then all the ads and sponsored content that convinces you to buy stuff that you don't need, I think in the long run it ends up being a cheaper and more fulfilling lifestyle to amass a library that is a reflection of yourself and can be shared with trusted friends.
Sometimes when I show people my phone, they ask, "Are you happier?" and they usually say "There have been studies, you know, that being on the smartphone makes you depressed." They're usually referring to studies referenced to in "The Anxious Generation", a book on this topic that I haven't read. I did read about the book, and it falls into the traps that a lot of pop-science-self-help books do. It's cherry-picked data to confirm the authors thesis and it isn't the kind of non-fiction I'm interested in. Anyway, the answer is no, leaving the smartphone behind didn't automatically make me this anxiety-free happy person. What it has done is it gives me the time to do the things that make me happier. I'm listening to more music, I'm reading more, I'm savoring the photos I take. I'm listening in the environments I'm in and break out the field recorder every once in a while. I think I'm regaining the consciousness I had. I truly do feel hijacked in a way. I'm still a slave to dopamine feedback loops. I play games, eat food, code, all of these things make me feel accomplished, but more so, my life feels enriched. When all of my attention was on a screen that simulated life, i knew something needed to change.
I have plenty of political takes that I’ve opted to edit out of this post because I want to flesh out those ideas in more focused essays. The political climate certainly motivated me to move away from this streamlined, centralized internet. Stay tuned for more posts that explore surveillance capitalism, the attention economy, and much more. I wanted this post to focus on the lifestyle changes I’ve had to make as a result of ditching the smartphone.