Ask HN: How else to live more minimally?

I agree about no social media. And no news. I agree about privacy, reducing ads, and aggressively filtering and blocking spam email.

Minimalism for its own sake can turn into a fetish, or virtue signaling, with the main reward coming from telling people about it. I prefer to choose what to use based on necessity, convenience, and the alternatives.

For example, because I work while slow traveling (digital nomad if you prefer) I need messaging apps to stay in touch with family, friends, clients. Too many people don’t read emails and don’t answer phone calls, they won’t change their habits for me. I find maps useful in new locations, superior to the alternative of paper maps or printed guidebooks. I need to manage bank accounts and credit cards in my home country, easiest to do that with the apps, which can use biometrics (face ID or touch ID) unlike web sites that will constantly require confirmation.

I use an iPhone for the ecosystem and enhanced privacy features. I like having a camera handy. I like cloud storage so I’m not carrying a lot of paper around.

If you look at what other people do while staring at their phones you’ll see social media, messaging, videos, games. Those apps can get addictive, but the fault doesn’t lie in the phone but from apps we can choose not to install. I would prefer a world with people paying less attention to their phones, but I have to live in the world as it is, not as I’d like it.

I think in tech circles there is this obsession with aesthetic of minimalism which I suspect is driven by nostalgia. It comes up all the time on HN, and the usual suspects are ditching smartphones and going back to paper.

Personally, I prefer "utilitarian" over "minimal". Everything around me serves a purpose, when it stops doing that its gone.

I still use a smartphone and gmail. I avoid paper and "uni-taskers".

The one thing I agree with is cutting out all news. I have not found news across any medium to provide any actionable benefits to my life.

One thing to consider is replacing massive social networks with close-connection (people from real life) and interest-based networks. There are well-funded, anonymous actors within these large platforms, driven by perverse incentives that are often counter to your well-being.

Tried living with a Nokia 2720 flip-fone. It was Ok, but I missed Google Maps and don't particularly want to carry a street directory. So using a basic Android smartphone with no social media, banking, etc on it. Probably use it no more than 15-20 minutes a day.

From the title I thought minimally meant like in a log cabin deep in some woods or on a mountain top. To answer your question, don't load apps that you don't really need and use a bit of discipline to curtail unproductive time on the browser, etc.

IMHO: I don't think living minimally is solely (or maybe even primarily) about what you cut out, but how you spend your time and value your life.

If you want to live locally, I think it's more about building connections and community – local friends, shops, artists, musicians, workout studios, businesspeople, industry, ranchers, farmers, students, museums, city councils, etc. And that can look very different depending on where you live. "Local" in the Bay Area is going to be mostly techies. "Local" in rural middle-America is going to be ranchers and farmers. "Local" in some small outdoorsy town will be a lot of hikers, skiers, bikers, etc.

The thing is... people can have all the things you mentioned above, but still live "minimally" because they don't focus on those things. They don't give more than a passing thought to those things, whether they have them or not. Their lives are too full of the things and people they love the most.

It's not about what you cut out, but what you embrace. Chase (or find) your passions and the rest just naturally fall aside.

What’s your goal in living minimally?

I don't feel like you need much to "be happy" in the tech sense. For the past 5 years I've been using Linux, reading HN and RSS for news and using an Android smartphone without debilitating social side effects. I don't scroll feeds, I wait to read texts until respectful times and I have a Gmail that has a few thousand marketing emails I never read. Some nights I watch a couple hours of YouTube (gasp!).

A lot of solutions to the harm tech causes can be remediated by figuring out how these things affect you. Obsessing over the news makes me upset - when I realize this, I divert my attention to other things. If you can't foster the willpower to resist these ills on your own, you're not prepared to use devices with a healthy mindset in the first place.

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