Digital Minimalism

New York Times Magazine, he also discovered that the smartphone kept emerging as a
persistent signal among the noise of plausible hypotheses. “Anxious kids certainly existed
before Instagram,” he writes, “but many of the parents I spoke to worried that their kids’
digital habits—round-the-clock responding to texts, posting to social media, obsessively
following the filtered exploits of peers—were partly to blame for their children’s struggles.”
Denizet-Lewis assumed that the teenagers themselves would dismiss this theory as
standard parental grumbling, but this is not what happened. “To my surprise, anxious
teenagers tended to agree.” A college student he interviewed at a residential anxiety
treatment center put it well: “Social media is a tool, but it’s become this thing that we can’t
live without that’s making us crazy.”
As part of his reporting, Denizet-Lewis interviewed Jean Twenge, who made it clear that
she didn’t set out to implicate the smartphone: “It seemed like too easy an explanation for
negative mental-health outcomes in teens,” but it ended up the only explanation that fit the

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timing. Lots of potential culprits, from stressful current events to increased academic
pressure, existed before the spike in anxiety that begins around 2011. The only factor that
dramatically increased right around the same time as teenage anxiety was the number of
young people owning their own smartphones.
“The use of social media and smartphones look culpable for the increase in teen mental-
health issues,” she told Denizet-Lewis. “It’s enough for an arrest—and as we get more data,
it might be enough for a conviction.” To emphasize the urgency of this investigation,
Twenge titled her article in the Atlantic with a blunt question: “Have Smartphones
Destroyed a Generation?”
Returning to our canary-in-the-coal-mine analogy, the plight of iGen provides a strong
warning about the danger of solitude deprivation. When an entire cohort unintentionally
eliminated time alone with their thoughts from their lives, their mental health suffered
dramatically. On reflection, this makes sense. These teenagers have lost the ability to
process and make sense of their emotions, or to reflect on who they are and what really
matters, or to build strong relationships, or even to just allow their brains time to power
down their critical social circuits, which are not meant to be used constantly, and to
redirect that energy to other important cognitive housekeeping tasks. We shouldn’t be
surprised that these absences lead to malfunctions.
Most adults stop short of the constant connectivity practiced by members of iGen, but if
you extrapolate these effects to the somewhat milder forms of solitude deprivation that
have become common among many different age groups, the results are still worrisome. As
I’ve learned by interacting with my readers, many have come to accept a background hum
of low-grade anxiety that permeates their daily lives. When looking for explanations, they
might turn to the latest crisis—be it the recession of 2009 or the contentious election of
2016—or chalk it up to a normal reaction to the stresses of adulthood. But once you begin
studying the positive benefits of time alone with your thoughts, and encounter the
distressing effects that appear in populations that eliminate this altogether, a simpler
explanation emerges: we need solitude to thrive as human beings, and in recent years,
without even realizing it, we’ve been systematically reducing this crucial ingredient from
our lives.
Simply put, humans are not wired to be constantly wired.
THE CONNECTED CABIN
Assuming you accept my premise that solitude is necessary to thrive as a human being, the
natural follow-up question is: How can you find enough of this solitude in the hyper-
connected twenty-first century? To answer it, we can draw an unexpected insight from
Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond.
Thoreau’s retreat to the woods beyond Concord, Massachusetts, with the intention to
live more deliberately, is cited as a classic example of solitude. Thoreau helped spread this
conception. His book about the experience, Walden, is rich with long passages describing
Thoreau alone and observing the slow rhythms of nature. (You’ll never think of pond ice
the same way again after you read Thoreau’s lengthy discussion of how its qualities change
throughout the winter.)
In the decades since Walden’s release, however, critics have been busy attacking the
mythology of Walden as an isolated outpost. Historian W. Barksdale Maynard, to cite one
example among many, listed in a 2005 essay the many ways in which Thoreau was
anything but isolated during his time at the pond. Thoreau’s cabin, it turns out, was not in
the woods, but in a clearing near the woods that was in sight of a well-traveled public road.
Thoreau was only a thirty-minute walk from his hometown of Concord, where he returned
regularly for meals and social calls. Friends and family, for their part, visited him
constantly at his cabin, and Walden Pond, far from an untrammeled oasis, was then, as it
remains today, a popular destination for tourists seeking a nice walk or swim.

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But as Maynard explains, this complicated mixture of solitude and companionship is not
a secret Thoreau was trying to hide. It was, in some sense, the whole point. “[Thoreau’s]
intention was not to inhabit a wilderness,” he writes, “but to find wildness in a suburban
setting.”
We can substitute solitude for wildness in this sentence without changing its meaning.
Thoreau had no interest in complete disconnection, as the intellectual milieu of mid-
nineteenth-century Concord was surprisingly well developed and Thoreau didn’t want to
completely disengage from this energy. What Thoreau sought in his experiment at Walden
was the ability to move back and forth between a state of solitude and a state of connection.
He valued time alone with his thoughts—staring at ice—but he also valued companionship
and intellectual stimulation. He would have rejected a life of true hermit-style isolation
with the same vigor with which he protested the thoughtless consumerism of the early
industrial age.
This cycle of solitude and connection is a solution that comes up often when studying
people who successfully sidestep solitude deprivation; think, for example, of Lincoln
spending his summer nights at his cottage before returning to the bustling White House in
the morning, or of Raymond Kethledge taking a break from the busy courthouse to clarify
his thoughts in a quiet barn. The pianist Glenn Gould once proposed a mathematical
formula for this cycle, telling a journalist: “I’ve always had a sort of intuition that for every
hour you spend with other human beings you need X number of hours alone. Now what
that X represents I don’t really know . . . but it’s a substantial ratio.”
It’s exactly this alternation between regular time alone with your thoughts and regular
connection that I propose as the key to avoiding solitude deprivation in a culture that also
demands connection. As Thoreau’s example emphasizes, there’s nothing wrong with
connectivity, but if you don’t balance it with regular doses of solitude, its benefits will
diminish.
To help you realize this cycle in your modern life, this chapter concludes with a small
collection of practices—each of which offers a specific and effective approach to integrating
more solitude into an otherwise connected routine. These practices are not exhaustive nor
are they obligatory. Think of them instead as a look at the varied ways that people have
succeeded in creating their own metaphorical cabin by the pond in an increasingly noisy
world.
PRACTICE: LEAVE YOUR PHONE AT HOME
The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas, doesn’t allow you to use phones once the
film begins. The glow of the screen distracts patrons from the cinematic experience, and
the Alamo Drafthouse is the type of place where people respect cinematic experience. Most
movie theaters, of course, politely ask moviegoers to put away their phones, but this
particular venue takes this prohibition seriously. Here’s their official policy, lifted from
their website:
We have zero tolerance for talking or cell phone use of any kind during films.
We’ll kick you out, promise. We’ve got backup.
This policy is notable in part because it’s so exceptional in the movie business. The
standard multiplex has implicitly given up on the idea that people can make it through a
film without using their phone. Some are even considering formalizing this retreat. “You
can’t tell a 22-year-old to turn off their cellphone,” said the CEO of the AMC theater chain
in a 2016 interview with Variety. “That’s not how they live their life.” He then revealed that
the company is considering relaxing their existing (though largely ignored) cell phone
bans.
The failed fight against cell phones in movie theaters is a specific consequence of a more
general shift that’s occurred over the past decade: the transformation of the cell phone
from an occasionally useful tool to something we can never be apart from. This rise of cell

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