Digital Minimalism and the Financial Independence Movement

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One of my goals for the “staycation” was to read 2 books. I had heard several podcasters I’ve listen to interview Cal Newport about his new book, Digital Minimalism and it seemed like something I wanted to know more about. Because there is a giant queue to get it at the library, and this was my special “week”, I decided to buy myself a copy. As soon as I started reading the book, I saw a bunch of parallels between Digital Minimalism and the financial independence movement. Therefore, I felt like I needed to write a post detailing how being conscious about spending time on smartphones is similar to being conscious about spending money.

The Book

Digital Minimalism is a philosophy of using technology where it provides a clear benefit and blissfully missing out on minor conveniences. I would state that the core tenant of the book is that you should be intentional about what technology you bring into your life and how you use it. In my mind, FI(RE) is about being intentional with how you spend every dollar to maximize your lifelong happiness. In both cases, they’re about being intentional, in one case about money and in the other about technology.

The Relationship to FIRE

Cal Newport starts the argument for digital minimalism by spending a long time talking about Henry David Thoreau’s time on Walden pond. I read Walden in 2010. At about the same time, I read The Thoreau You Don’t Know by Robert Sullivan, one of my favorite authors, which compared the “new economy” (post 2008 financial disaster) to the “new economy” described by Thoreau. Reading Newport’s book on Thoreau’s economy of intentionality brought back my memories of those books and made me question why I had never considered Thoreau in my own thoughts about FIRE. I think this describes a little bit further explanation

Thoreau- the OG of FIRE

For some reason, my “history of FIRE” started with Vicki Robbin and Joe Domingues and Your Money or Your Life. How could I have forgotten about Thoreau? I can explain. When I read Walden, I thought that Thoreau was smug ass-hat knowitall who couldn’t help telling people he was morally superior by living a life devoid of consumption. (Despite the fact that he was living on someone else’s land for free!). I think the only part of the book I clearly remember is that he berates a day-laborer for buying coffee. And he has this giant argument with the poor guy about his coffee habit.

In fact, thinking about Thoreau today, he pretty much checks off all of the key features of a FIRE blogger:

• White dude
• Tries to convince people that we can all live like he does (but ignores key facts that has made his life easy).
• Tries to shame poor people for their poor spending choices.

I mean, Thoreau was lecturing people about their “latte factor” 150 years before Starbucks even existed. That dude is hard core.

Digital Minimalism and Financial Independence

If we move past the flaws in Thoreau’s FIRE credentials (which I apparently have a hard time doing), he did lay down some good framework for optimizing your lifestyle. Thoreau calculated how much his life on Walden costs and found that it took him only one day per week of labor to live his minimal life. Newport points out that Thoreau was able to sustain his life on only one day of work per week because he had carefully curated what was in his life to only keep what was important. (Newport glosses over the smug ass-hat and subsidized lifestyle aspects).

Re-reading about Thoreau now that I’m into FI(RE) was a good exercise. I realized that perhaps I’m a Thoreau knock-off smug ass-hat trying to tell people how to live their lives. And it has made me want to re-read Walden through the eyes of FIRE.

More importantly, this argument for Digital Minimalism really resonated with me. I have been trying to optimize every dollar I spend to make sure it brings happiness to my life. Why? Because every dollar represents some of my life energy that I gave up to earn it. So why am I so worried about saving money on groceries to preserve my life energy while I freely waste more than an hour a day on my phone?]

Further connections between Digital Minimalism and Financial Independence

Later on in the book Newport stresses the need for “high quality leisure time”. This is something I have already spent a lot of time contemplating after reading The Joy of Not Working. However, I enjoyed Newport’s assessment of the kinds of leisure activities that build you up (they involve creating stuff). Newport does a great job about contrasting woodworking and gardening against mindlessly swiping at screens. It helped me reassert my desire to pursue leisure and avoid mindless activities. In the Joy of Not Working, Zelinski spends a lot of time talking about how bad watching TV is for you. However, in today’s society, perhaps mindless scrolling through Pinterest is today’s version of watching sitcoms.

Not surprisingly, Newport holds up the FI community as a good example of how to have fulfilling leisure time. He goes into quite a bit of detail about Mr. Money Mustache and Liz from the Frugalwoods. Both of these pillars of FI have been quite vocal about their leisure activities (MMM- construction, Frugalwoods- homesteading). I thought it was great that not only was there FI connections with being intentional (earlier in the book) but also looking at FI members as good examples at how to use leisure time in ways that don’t involve screens.

Digital Minimalism and my “Digital Declutter”

The rest of the book focuses on establishing tools to help you minimize your dependence on technology and the benefits for doing so. Newport recommends a 30 day fast from all non-essential technologies. Then, after this 30 day process, you’re allowed to add in technologies that really bring utility into your life, but with strict ground-rules about how and when you’ll implement the technology.

I was really inspired by the book and decided to do my own “Digital Declutter”. Here are the ground rules I am setting for myself.

My digital declutter:

• Stay logged off Twitter. (I had originally set a goal of being off Twitter for a week. I’m extending that to a month)
• Keep my cell phone powered off.
  • Power it on for 2x week to check & respond to texts and record workouts downloaded from my Apple Watch
  • Keep phone nearby in case I need to 2 factor authenticate (I will turn it on to 2FA but then turn it off again).
• Special rules for travel
  • Keep phone powered off as much as possible.
  • Remove internet browser from home screen/easy access buttons
  • Try to only use phone to navigate when driving and scan boarding pass.

Dates: May 21-June 21, 2019

At first I thought I’d just power off my phone for the entire month and put it in a drawer. But then I realized, annoyingly, that I need my phone to access quite a few websites through 2-factor authentication. So my current plan is to just keep it powered off but nearby.

I also thought I could travel without my phone. I was one of the last people I know to get a smartphone. And I used to print off these giant packets of information before my work trip. Hotel information, flight information, local maps, turn by turn directions. It was awesome.  However, it required a lot of work to create the packet-o-stuff. I think using my phone would make my travel less stressful and as long as I didn’t sit in the airport mindlessly browsing the news or Twitter, then I’d probably get the advantages of having a phone while still disconnecting from the constant hum of technology.

Post-declutter life TBD:

I’m having a hard time deciding what I want my equilibrium relationship with technology to be. I haven’t been on Facebook since the 2016 presidential election. And I was social media free until I started my blog. In the 4 months since I started it, I’ve developed quite the appetite for Twitter. I’ve really enjoyed “connecting” with other personal finance bloggers.  (Although Cal Newport would argue that it’s not a real connection). Also, Twitter pretty much drives all of my blog traffic. Since I left Twitter, I’ve had the lowest number of page views per day since the blog was brand new.

What to do about the blog?

Figuring out what to do with social media post-declutter then becomes an existential question about my blog. How can I practice digital minimalism while being a financial independence blogger? Why am I blogging and what do I want to get out of it? I’m not sure I know the exact answers to those questions. I know I

1. Want to help federal employees who are considering retiring early.
2. Have found it helpful to think through my own thoughts about early retirement by blogging about them
3. Enjoy the accountability of making public declarations. (I know The Fioneers would be all over me if I posted a picture of me eating meat on Twitter after I talked about how our family has transitioned to vegetarianism).

None of those goals require getting a certain number of page views or users or subscribers. In fact the last two are valid even if no one reads the blog. I do like it when I get a lot of traffic, but that’s an external factor that I can’t control. While I think that more readers might mean that I’m helping more federal employees consider early retirement, I think I should only focus on writing good articles and not care who reads them.

Hopefully I’ll be able to figure out how I want to approach social media during my decluttering period. My final thought is that if I did abandon social media, I’d be kind of like a smug Thoreau-ian ass-hat who espouses the virtues of isolation while depending on other people to share his articles over social media

**UPDATE**

After I wrote this post my phone died. I had a minor freak-out trying to figure out what to do. I thought about not replacing it for a few days. In the end, I decided to get a newer, bigger, better iPhone. This resulted in my 11 year old saying, “Dad, if you’re trying to not use your phone so much, why did you buy a nice one?”. (BURN!) I told her the truth– it was complicated and I felt conflicted about it but ultimately felt it was the best decision for me.

Somehow as a result of all of this, I didn’t stick to my digital declutter rules. I think I need some more and maybe attack the digital declutter again in a little bit. For now, I’ve set a “screen time” limit on Twitter in my iPhone. I like knowing that I have a certain amount of minutes per day and it makes me prioritize my time on the website.

How much social media do you consume? Do you find parallels between Digital Minimalism and Financial Independence? Leave a comment!