Today, we’ve got these platforms that offer us everything. If you want to watch a video, you’ll likely go to YouTube. If you want to watch a TV show, you’ll probably find it on a Netflix-like streaming service. If you’re after music, everything’s on Spotify.

But what if having everything isn’t what’s best for us?

What if we’re missing out on a better life because we’ve accepted access to everything? What if access to less would lead to a happier life?

The essence of minimalism is an understanding of the costs of clutter paired with an appreciation for space itself (think: whitespace on a graphic design, physical space in a room, or a smartphone home screen decluttered of icons).

It appears to be the case that our minds can only absorb so much clutter before there is a loss of productivity or a hit to our wellbeing. It’s as if there’s something in us that simply can’t bear that much clutter. In the contrapositive case, this can be seen in hoarders; when a space contains excessive clutter to an extreme, it poses an unavoidable problem for its inhabitants.

I’d speculate that people have different thresholds for how much clutter is too much, but the main point I’m making is that such a threshold exists. Perhaps YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, and the like are well past that threshold for most people. Yet, we don’t realize this is the case, because we have a hard time imagining an alternative. We think this is how it has to be.

There’s a small market of alternative smartphones that’s been slowly emerging over the past several years, affectionately called “dumb phones”. The Light Phone was the first of these to become well-known, but there are others. This small, experimental market shows there’s some demand for tools that offer a less-is-more approach to digital life.

I can see no reason why pursuing a more minimalist approach wouldn’t be prudent, especially considering that we can already observe some loss of productivity and wellbeing due to the current instantiation of the smartphone. Many people aren’t comfortable saying out loud how much time they’ve lost to their smartphone.

The natural response to this is to attempt to do something to reduce the waste and reclaim the lost time and attention. In the language of minimalism, you would call this a “decluttering” - the act of taking everything out of the space, re-evaluating what truly belongs there, and putting back only those things that belong.

“You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?”

-Steven Wright

As an exercise, I asked myself what apps I consider truly essential when it comes to the smartphone. I’d imagine each person’s list would be slightly different, but there would be major overlaps. Here’s the list I came up with:

  • Authenticator (if your job requires it)
  • Books
  • Calculator
  • Calendar
  • Camera
  • Clock
  • Email
  • Maps
  • Messages
  • Music
  • Notes
  • Peer-to-peer payment app (ex: Cash App)
  • Photos
  • Podcasts
  • Timer/Stopwatch
  • Todo List
  • Voice Memos
  • Wallet
  • Weather

In addition to the above list, there are a few more apps worth considering:

  • 3rd party messaging apps (ex: WhatsApp)
  • AI chat app (ex: ChatGPT)
  • News (ideally an app without an infinite feed, OR a plan to stay away from its infinite feed)
  • Password manager
  • Rideshare app (ex: Uber)
  • Sports scores (ideally one without an infinite feed such as Apple Sports)

What remains - which is a difficult consideration - is what to do with the web browser. On the one hand, the web browser is clearly useful at times. You can use it to fill out a medical form or look at a restaurant’s menu. On the other hand, the web browser is clearly something that gives you access to everything (almost by definition). Maybe in the future, we will develop a sophisticated way of getting what’s useful out of web browsers while at the same time not opening the door wide open to all possible clutter.

We’ve gone through a period of giving ourselves access to all the world’s information, and now we are seeing signs that we can’t handle it as well as we thought we could. Maybe the next innovations will be innovations of curation. Perhaps we will collectively discover there’s really something to the adage less is more.