Digital Minimalism (Part 1)

Lately I've been feeling a bit overwhelmed by feeds, algorithms, ads, subscriptions, streaming, and AI, and it pushed me to start exploring this idea of unplugging, or "digital minimalism". It's quite a rabbit hole, as I've recently found out, but I jumped in anyways. I've had some interesting findings, so I decided to share them here on my blog.

It all started a few months ago when I saw my screen time on my phone pushing 7 hours. It felt like a lot of my day was getting sucked away by doom scrolling. I've tried blockers, deleting apps, letting my phone die, but nothing could really stop my urge to scroll youtube shorts and other social media apps.

Since I'm wanting to get some of my hobbies going, start reading, writing and studying again, and making actual progress on a multitude of personal projects, I felt that the smart phone had to go or get minimized as much as possible, or else I'll never get the 3-4 hours back per day that I need to pursue anything.

I had some slow progress in the recent months at reducing my screen time, mainly with the discovery of a browser called Firefox Focus. It's a single tab and doesn't save any cookies so you have to sign into everything every time you want to use it, which is delightfully inconvenient. X(twitter) doesn't work on the app at all, which has been great from keeping me off of there. I've started only watching youtube from the browser, and the barrier of having to sign in every time surely has reduced my screen time. Though I still found myself scrolling too much despite all the apps being off my phone and accessing them through Firefox Focus.

During one of my youtube rabbit-hole sessions I stumbled upon a video of someone talking about how they split functions of their smart phone out into multiple devices in order to reduce screen time, and also regain higher quality experiences with things like, photography, music, mobile gaming, and note-taking. I found myself inspired to do the same.

I had actually recently already been inspired to get back into physical media again and went to the local used CD/Vinyl store, here in Mitaka, and found ten 500 yen CDs of artists like the Beatles, Green Day, Ozzy Osbourne, Nirvana, and others. The reason I was inspired to do this is because I had a disturbing realization that, ever since music streaming was invented, I couldn't think of a single time that I discovered a new artist through streaming algorithms.

Most of the music I had been listening to on streaming services was generic music that was decent, but nothing that made me stop my work and try to see who the artist is. Back in high school ('07-'11) I had a collection of CDs which was comprised of music I really loved. I haven't really had anything like this since.

So naturally, the first device I researched was an mp3 player. I didn't think I would ever buy an mp3 player ever again after the invention of the smart phone, but I liked the idea of a dedicated music playing device that had more storage than anything I could have ever owned in the 2010s, filled with my own curated library of songs from CDs I owned physically. I bought an mp3 player with a micro SD slot (I slotted a 256GB card), and the ability to play pretty much any audio file type under the sun. Since it arrived I've been filling it up with my CD music collection that I started recently, with high quality lossless files. I've listened to it while working and when lying in bed at night and I can't imagine going back. It's really nice to just listen to an album that I specifically spent time buying, ripping, and uploading to my mp3 player with not auto play or algorithm. I'm really looking forward to going to Tower Records in the coming months to buy some new albums and try to discover new artists the old way.

The second device I started looking for was a camera to replace my smartphone camera. I actually used to work as a professional photographer in the past, and I used the Sony Alpha series mirrorless camera, which was my favorite camera. I didn't have the budget or justification to purchase an expensive camera like the Sony, so I needed to do research on a really solid camera with a wide range of lens types that's affordable. After hours and hours of research, I landed on a pre-owned Olympus OM-D EM10II, which apparently is a camera with a large cult following. Apparently it's because of it's 3:4 aspect ratio, great image stabilization, and nostalgic looking image outputs.

I mainly wanted something I can use to build up my intuition for lenses again. I use lens type instructions in my storyboards for work. Anime takes a lot of inspiration from live action filmmaking, so we really like to consider cinematography and composition even though we're just drawing all the contents on the screen. For the purposes of this blog, and for all the photos I take in the future for the foreseeable future, I'll be using this camera. (The banner photo of this post was actually taken with my new camera when I was testing it out).

I think our culture lost something valuable with the invention of phone camera. Maybe I can help re-normalize dedicated cameras in every day situations, while also brushing up on my composition and cinematography skills.

I didn't gather any additional devices, than those so far, but I did make some other changes that I believe will be helping greatly in escaping the algorithm. The first of which is taking my phone saturation down to a level where the color is more dull than real life. I did take a bit of color theory back in college, I remembered that relative color actually matters scientifically, and thought I could apply this idea to my extremely colorful iphone screen. Almost instantly after using my phone for a while with the saturation down I noticed the colors in my house and outside seems much more vibrant, like the saturation was turned up. So far it's actually gotten me to just look around at the real world more, and avert my gaze from my phone even when I'm browsing the web or watching youtube on my phone.

The next digital change I made was unsubscribing from all the video streaming platforms where I normally would watch anime or movies. I'm beyond fatigued with subbing and unsubbing from every subscription service just to watch specific shows or movies, so I thought finding a solution for this would be really great.

I discovered an open source personal netflix builder called Jellyfin. It takes a while set up, but it's been really great so far. Essentially you can add files from DVDs and Blurays you currently own to build out a locally hosted streaming platform for your personal movie collection. It also pulls in metadata from the internet so you can see movie ratings, reviews, cast details, and it categorizes everything by genre which is super convenient. It also can be accessed from any device in the house that has an internet browser, which is every device these days. My wife and I both have VR headsets so we tested out watching content on theater sized screens in VR and were able to get syncing set up. It allowed us to pause and play the video simultaneously. I could see this being useful for people who want to watch across multiple areas of the house like if you are in the kitchen cooking, and you don't want to miss out on whatever movie or series you're watching with the person who's in the living room!

The final change I've made since starting this was utilizing Chrome extensions again to clean up sites that I end up scrolling too much because the algorithm keeps giving me too much good stuff. There's a lot of great extensions for this purpose, here's a quick list of what I've got running so far.
Untrap for Youtube
Adblock for Youtube
Adblock Plus
Unhook Youtube
Uninternet

I plan on making this a recurring topic on my blog, since I've just begun my digital minimalism journey. My screen time is down to about 2 hours per day from 7, but I really want to get smartphone time under 30 minutes if possible.

I'll try to make some reports here on how the progress goes with my screen time. So far it seems to be a good direction to move in, I finally felt like I had the time left in the day to write on my blog again, which is really great.