# "The first two weeks are the hardest": my first digital declutter

It is unbearable to not be consuming. All through the house is nothing but silence. The need inside of me is not an ache, it is caustic, sour, the burning desire to be distracted, to be listening, watching, scrolling.

Some of the time I think I’m happy. I think this is very good. I go to the park and lie on a blanket in a sun with a book and a notebook. I watch the blades of grass and the kids and the dogs and the butterflies and I’m so happy to be free.

Then there are the nights. The dark silence is so oppressive, so all-consuming. One lonely night, early on, I bike to a space where I had sometimes felt welcome, and thought I might again.

“What are you doing here?” the people ask.

“I’m three days into my month of digital minimalism and I’m so bored, I just wanted to be around people.”

No one really wants to be around me. Okay.

One of the guys had a previous life as a digital minimalism coach. “The first two weeks are the hardest,” he tells me encouragingly.

“Two WEEKS?” I want to shriek.

Hanging out there does not go well. My diary entry that night reads “I sobbed alone and life felt unbearable and I wondered what Cal Newport’s advice is when your digital declutter just uncovers that there is nothing in your life, that you are unwanted and unloved and have no community or connections”.

It is not a good night.

On a Thursday night, I think about going to a meetup. I walk to the restaurant, but I don’t see anyone I know inside, and I don’t go in. I sit on a bench nearby for half an hour, just watching people go back and forth, averting my eyes so meetup-goers won’t recognize me. A bus goes by. Three minutes later, a woman around my age sees me sitting on the bench. “Excuse me,” she says, “do you know if the bus went by yet?”

“Yeah, it did,” I tell her. “Sorry!”

“Oh, thanks!”

I’m ecstatic with the interaction, giddy. A person talked to me! I helped her!

I wander away from the bench, but I don’t want to go home yet. I usually avoid the busier, more commercial streets when I’m out walking, but today I’m drawn to them — I need to hear voices, I need things to look at, lights and colors and things that move.

I go into the Trader Joe’s on the corner of my block, just because it’s bright inside and full of people. An older man asks an older woman if she knows where the coffee is. This is something I will notice repeatedly and starkly: that only older people talk to strangers, and they seem to have learned that young people don’t want to be asked for things. Is this a post-pandemic thing? In 2019 at this same Trader Joe’s I asked a guy my age to reach something off a high shelf for me and he was happy to oblige.

In any case, the older woman does not know where the coffee is.

“Hi,” I stick my head into the conversation. “The coffee’s over there, by the bread.” I point.

“Oh, thank you!”

He’s so genuinely delighted. Is this what it could be like to go through the world?

When I get home my upstairs neighbor is outside, and I talk to him a bit. He’s in his 60s, too. Young people don’t talk to each other.

A few days later, back at that Trader Joe’s with my Post-it note shopping list in hand, I find that the store doesn’t carry buttermilk, which I need for a recipe. Standing in the long checkout line, I turn to the woman behind me.

“Do you know what I can substitute for buttermilk in a baking recipe?” I ask her. She’s in her 60s. The man behind her, in his 40s, gets into the conversation, seems happy to offer me solutions.

I tell a friend about the encounter later and they say that every part of them clenched just to hear about it. They could never imagine doing such a thing, and they have no desire to.

I hadn’t realized I had any desire to, either.