Published on November 9, 2025 8:20 PM GMT
In my first week of digital declutter, I started to feel human again.
I didn’t and still don’t know what I meant by this, but the words felt right. And I’m not the first to feel this way — the 2016 essay that inspired Cal Newport to write Digital Minimalism was called “I Used to Be a Human Being”.
Even if I don’t know what it means, I’m interested in exploring why I feel so strongly that I stopped really being human for a while, and then started again.
Hypothesis 1: To be human, I must have control over my actions
If I had to choose a point in time when I went from being human to not, it was the pandemic. Not original, but true.
Before the pandemic, people had already been struggling with their device use for years, but there were plenty of holdouts. But then, it became necessary to do all of life online. You had to check the news daily to learn what was legal, what was safe, what kind of life you could lead today. You had to conduct almost all commerce and human interaction through a screen.
And then the lockdowns ended, but the habits had been established, and they were very hard to break. From March of 2020 when I first went into lockdown, through October of 2023 when I decided to do digital minimalism, I spent most of every day on my computer. I’d look up and find that the whole day had passed.
When I finally broke that habit, it was the first time I felt in control of where my time and attention were going. I wasn’t an automaton anymore. ‘Human’ is hard to define, but not being an automaton seems like a good place to start.
Hypothesis 2: To be human, I must connect with other people face-to-face
I’d always identified as shy, but before the pandemic, I was capable of talking to people. I went to work in an office every day and lived with housemates, and even sometimes talked to strangers. Once, on the train to work, I gave some strangers my age advice on a fruit fly infestation in their house, and we were all happy with the interaction.
After the pandemic, I could hardly talk to people I knew. I couldn’t imagine having an office job, and definitely couldn’t ever live in a group house again.
In 2022, I met some people who just easily made friends with strangers. I listened as an American with French much worse than mine held a whole conversation with a baker in Paris. I wanted to be like those people. I imagined the conversations I might have with the person next to me on the steps of the Sacré Coeur, or the person on the train who was reading a book I’d read. I came up with words in my head and just couldn’t say them. I sat there in silence and watched as the moment to speak agonizingly passed me by.
When I started my digital declutter, I didn’t know or expect that this would be something that would change. If asked, I would have said I didn’t actually really want to talk to strangers — most people my age don’t think they do.
Then I helped a stranger find something in a grocery store, and it was euphoric. Really. I was shockingly delighted. Now I make a point to talk to a stranger every day, even if it’s just saying hi, or making small talk with a cashier.
This month has been the first time I’ve regularly been around people in more than five years, and it’s like a new dimension to being alive. I feel real in a way that I don’t when I’m sitting at home alone, observed by only myself.
Hypothesis 3: To be human, I must meaningfully live in the world around me
During the pandemic, I basically did not leave my home for an entire year. When I did get out, my world was maybe three blocks wide, and almost devoid of people. I would wander amid the litter building up along the fences of abandoned gardens. I usually had my headphones on, and often a P100 and dark sunglasses, covering any way the world could possibly get in.
After, those years I spent with my phone constantly in hand, filling the stillness and silence of my home with the light of my laptop, I was just as effectively ignoring the world around me. Someone described my house as a museum. I was offended at the time but he was right. It was well-curated, not lived-in.
This spring, I was visiting my friend and her baby in the suburbs of Chicago. Walking the familiar route from her house into the little downtown area, I was thinking about my destination, wrapped in my thoughts, when I suddenly noticed that there were birds singing. There were buds on the grey tree branches and children laughing and wind in my hair. It had all been there the whole time. I’d just been walking without noticing it.
The two-year-olds I take care of live fully in the world around them, because there’s nowhere else for them to live. They’re always delightedly breaking sticks in half, slapping their hands in puddles, waving shirts around, putting on shoes and taking them off.
I want to feel what it’s like to hold a stick in my hand. I want to notice the children laughing. I don’t want to shut the world out anymore.
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