Millions of Americans start each morning by staring at a six-inch screen. Then they spend the day working in front of a 16-inch screen. They end the day watching a 60-inch screen. This isn’t just a dystopian nightmare, like the one depicted in Disney’s “WALL-E.” It’s real life for a lot of people. It was for me.

Meanwhile, depression and anxiety rates keep rising. This trend isn’t anything new. It’s been developing over the past decade or more. But can anything be done about it? Or should we resign ourselves to this horrible reality?

I submit there’s a way out of this digital bog, but it requires a level of self-reflection and intentionality that most are simply unwilling to do. It’s called digital minimalism.

Digging Deeper

The Digisphere – X, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, you name it – is structured in a way that makes the passive consumption of content hard to resist. The key here is passive. Intentional choice-making while on these platforms isn’t necessary. If we’re not intentional about why we’re on a platform, the decision will often be made for us.

The Digisphere preys on loneliness and indecisiveness. If we don’t have a justifiable reason for spending hours on a digital platform, we often get lost in the funhouse of rage bait and well-edited viral videos. Doomscrolling sets in. Virtually all of us have fallen victim to this at one time or another, yet few of us choose to do anything about it. In moments of boredom, indecision, or heightened stress, we pull up our social media platform of choice … and scroll.

This is called the Gruen Transfer, named after the Austrian-American architect, Victor Gruen, who’s credited with designing the shopping mall. His goal was to design the indoor shopping mall with confusing layouts, causing visitors to lose sight of their original purpose for being there, resulting in more impulse purchases. It’s the same reason casinos don’t have windows.

This behavior is corrosive – psychologically, emotionally, and yes, spiritually. Some may disagree, but I’ve come to see our relationship to the Digisphere as an addiction. As The Minimalists have wisely stated, scrolling is the new smoking.

The Response

This is partially why I’ve become a digital minimalist. I don’t have X, Instagram, or Facebook anymore. I’ve deleted most of my emails and unsubscribed from the dozens of newsletters I never got around to reading. I don’t read the news. I don’t keep up with trends. I’ve deleted all but the essential apps on my phone, and I’ve converted the display to grayscale.

This may seem extreme, but it was the right choice for me, because glass screens fundamentally dictate the lives of millions of people. It’s how we communicate, how we work, and how we find entertainment. But it comes at a steep cost.

In 1996, novelist David Foster Wallace said the following:

I think one of the reasons that I feel empty after watching a lot of TV, and one of the things that makes TV seductive, is that it gives the illusion of relationships with people. It’s a way to have people in the room talking and being entertaining, but it doesn’t require anything of me.

Switch out TV with social media in that quote. It’s the same formula, and consequently, it has produced the same damaging results. Instead of compulsively clicking the channel up or down button, we’re now constantly tapping our screens, checking for updates over and over again.

Some of us even suffer from Phantom Vibration Syndrome, a phenomenon where someone hallucinates that their phone is vibrating in their pocket when it hasn’t. This is usually caused by hypervigilance, heightened states of anxiety, and fear of having missed out on something important. In many ways, this is characteristic of an addiction.

Wallace went on to say:

Like, at a certain point we’re gonna have to build some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re going to die.

We’ve forgotten that socializing takes work and effort. When I walk into a coffee shop to order my iced mocha latte, I’m often met with a barista who can’t seem to hold eye contact with me for more than a few nanoseconds. The same is true in grocery stores. Public transportation. Neighbors. Family. Friends.

With all the time we’ve invested in social media over the last 20 years, we seem to have been conditioned to be anything but social. The irony, surely, isn’t lost on anyone.

Digital minimalism isn’t about opting out of the world. It’s about meaningfully engaging with the real world again, leaving behind the decaying and corrosive Digisphere – a sad simulacrum of reality that has kept us chained to our devices for far too long.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

Image credit: Unsplash