For me, digital minimalism means figuring out an addiction. It’s hard, and I go through cycles of binging and purging.

As a millennial, I grew up with a personal TV, cable, and broadband internet on a private computer all in my childhood bedroom from the age of 11 (in 2003). And at the time – believing these technologies to be the ingredients of good living – I felt blessed about my sweet setup (we said sweet a lot in the early aughts).

A lot of my nostalgia is from sitting in front of a screen, though. And if nostalgia is a window into what’s meaningful in a life story, then that’s regrettable.

Many of my fondest memories aren’t about life experiences shared with people I care about, but the fictional experiences of characters from commercial, mass-marketed stories and programs – or my imagined, parasocial relationships with podcasters whose conversations are always performative and edited to entertainment perfection.

And I’m not saying that my actual life has to be more interesting than Harry Potter’s – but shouldn’t it at least get a line or scene here and there?

Fast forward 20 years, and I’ve been living in Taiwan for almost a decade. I’ve never been homesick, because aside from still being thrilled to be away from my home town, every nostalgic nugget I hold dear can be streamed or downloaded in the form of a song, picture, ebook, video, or podcast, at virtually no monetary cost.

I’m beginning to suspect there’s another cost, though, which is making me another kind of sick.

It’s 2023, and the Covid pandemic has officially ended (for me). Nearby countries like Japan are reopening their borders, and Taiwan’s grace period for foreign nationals who arrived on visa exempt entry – after 3 years (that’s what I call grace!) – is ending. As a “digital nomad,” it’s time for me to start making visa runs again.

I haven’t seen my dad in 4 long years now; before, we would meet up in Japan every year and a half or so, during one of such visa runs.

But in the week of September leading up to my birthday, we finally meet again in Sapporo. Every day of the trip, we go out for two blocks of a few hours, and spend the rest of the time recharging (we’re introverts) in our rooms.

Something’s off, though. Every second of “rest,” I’m listening to podcasts and watching YouTube on my phone in a way I’d describe as feverish.

I’m anxious. My mind is whirring. At a point, I’m not even enjoying it anymore. And yet, nothing appears more depriving and anxiety inducing than the idea of turning off the noise – or even just giving up on pinpointing the source of the next hit.

I can’t face the void of… What? Any empty room? Something slower, like a book or song? My thoughts? The quiet of a beautiful foreign city in Japan where, by some miracle, I’m able to hang out with my dad without another tourist in sight?

When I get home, I write in my 5 year journal for the first time in 2 years (yes, this does somewhat defeat the purpose of a 5 year journal).

First, I write about all the creative ambitions that had unexpectedly bubbled up, as I walked with my dad among Sapporo’s peaceful city streets and nature – mostly gardens and creeks around Shinto temples.

I want to learn more about Shintoism. I want to read more Tang Dynasty fiction, and translate it for people like me and my dad, who like old ghost stories. I want to get a fresh start on that novel – the cliche I apparently am – I’ve been wanting to write for so long. And I want to write a blog to connect with people over these thoughts and inspirations.

This journal goes back to 2020, though – and I see that these were all the same things I was saying I wanted to do back then, too.

But this isn’t the story of my life my journal tells. Instead, year after year, I fill all of my free time (and not so free time) listening to the same handful of podcasts and watching infinite YouTube, all the while making commitments to cut back that always fail.

The pop-psychology refrain comes to mind, that: If you want to know what you really want, look at what you actually do.

Could the problem be that mindless consumption of entertainment is what I really want, and the source of my discomfort is just the judgement I place on that? Maybe I just need to accept that I want and need to scroll – that this high-octane delivery system of entertainment is actually really great. I have a sweet setup – this is the good life – why shouldn’t I embrace it?

But I still don’t feel right, and so the second thing I write is that I want to learn to be in solitude.

This is followed closely by words that I haven’t forgotten since writing them: “I don’t want to have to constantly be numbing myself with podcasts and YouTube anymore.”

Incidentally, my dad accounts for most of my childhood nostalgia that wasn’t beamed into my eyes from a dead screen. My parents divorced young, so my sister and I only got together with Dad once a week. But whenever we did, we were either inventing games, telling stories, making believe, or all three.

We would drive all over town, going to parks and cemeteries, collecting clues to solve mysteries that I didn’t realize at the time my dad was improvising based on our suggestions (basically, we were young, unwitting LARPers).

And even later, when I was an angsty teenager who thought parents were lame, my Dad and I continued to invent sports in his yard every week with a combination of random sports equipment and Christmas decorations – and in the winter, take snowball fights as seriously as hardcore paintballers, stalking one another so patiently while gripping tight to our ammunition that I’m surprised we never got frostbite.

Six months after the Sapporo trip, I’m in Japan on another visa run – this time alone – and I’ve made little progress.

Podcasts are pounding in my ears the whole time I wander the streets of Okayama, and even as I hike the gorgeous grounds of Songenji Temple to the east of the city.

That’s not stimulating enough though, and so when I get back to my hotel, it’s time to really let loose with some YouTube time and “conbini” snacks in the bath.

As I wait to board my plane home the last day, I listen to a podcast interview with Anna Lembke about her book Dopamine Nation. She’s talking about addictions, with emphasis on digital media – and dopamine detoxing.

This time I write in my journal: “I think I’m actually addicted to the internet.”

If that seems beyond obvious, I’ll just say in my defense that I never felt my digital habits were much different from those of my peers. My use has always seemed average.

In fact, when I finally do start digital detoxing, the people closest to me don’t say: “Finally, you’re getting help!” But: “Is that really necessary?” and, “Aren’t you taking this a bit far?”

I make it through my first detox month (four weeks) without breaking. I don’t feel great on the other end of it, though. There will be a lot of experimentation – and what will feel like weakness and failure – ahead of me.

To date, I’ve been “clean” for most of the year and a quarter following that detox, though I’m still figuring things out.

If this is an addiction, does that mean a part of me wants to be addicted?

More to the point: What unmet needs have caused – or at least exacerbated – this addiction, and how do I address them? Is total abstinence (outside of work) self-sabotaging? Is there a level of moderation that could work? Why do I feel the way I do, when I do?

I still find it difficult to face “free-play” leisure time – though maybe that’s a side effect of inconsistency. (And, the fact that most people are too consumed with the comforts of digital media to meet up spontaneously anymore – I say, shaking my fist at a cloud.)

Today, for example, I had nothing planned after work, and it was agonizing.

This tends to play out in a familiar pattern: I get bored, then I rationalize that I’ve been good, and that just one podcast or an hour of YouTube is probably even healthier than total abstinence. Anyway, what am I, a monk?

Then, usually, it’s fine the first day or so. But by the third day, it’s not enough anymore. And by the end of the week, digital media is once again consuming most of my leisure time – 3 to 6 hours a day – and snuffing out my motivation to do anything else.

Still, even realizing this, I rationalize that there’s something missing that I might be able to discover if I maybe “experimented” with digital media just a bit more. And so the cycle continues, usually with a week or two of total abstinence spliced in between.

Don’t get me wrong, there are things I’ve needed to do to fill the void left by digital media, and find meaning in this project. It’s not all just abstinence and embracing solitude, and I’ve picked up a bunch of hobbies.

In my experience so far, though, nothing is going to make the addiction no longer tempting except more and more time away from it.

Likewise, nothing is going to make boredom bearable except for facing it over and over again despite the discomfort – and discovering again and again that it actually can quite easily lead to taking joy in activities that wouldn’t have seemed appealing at all on initial mental inventory.

Today, before I’d had this epiphany, I beared through the boredom when I was already sure I was going to give in to another “experiment.”

I had remembered what I used to do when I was bored as a kid – when there was nothing good on TV or online. I just listened to music, for hours.

It wasn’t just more mindless consumption, though, but a source of inspiration. I made up stories in my head to go along with the songs. And I created worlds by pretending everyday objects were other things – pennies, armies; remote controls, space ships; my crumpled blanket, a mountainous landscape.

One of the more rewarding hobbies I’ve picked up is playing acoustic guitar, and just short of making my AC remote levitate in the air, I decided to flip through the angsty emo jams that inspired me as a youth. I recalled a song from my first year of college, called “Fairweather,” by a little known post-hardcore group called Grace Gale. It sounded pretty straightforward – I could probably play it.

The only set of chords I found online sounded off, and there was no strum pattern, but as I tested it out, I realized that I might – for the first time since I started learning acoustic guitar, at the very beginning of my digital minimalist days – be able to figure this one out by ear, however imperfectly.

So I sat down with my guitar notebook and listened, over and over, while making notes for about an hour and half. By the end, it sounded decent – and the restlessness and anxiety from my boredom was gone, replaced with an unexpected sense of well-being, relaxation, and joy.

Then, I took out a different notebook, and wrote the first draft of this blog post by hand, with the serene sense persisting. I hope there will be more to come.

Until then, here’s my mediocre rendition of Grace Gale’s “Fairweather” (over the original) dedicated to my fairweather friend, the internet.