Live Your Best Life—On and Off Your Phone—in 2020 - WIRED

Given all the digital detritus, it makes sense that some people are longing for some empty space. But this isn’t really a book about technology, and Chayka offers a more careful consideration of the movement’s origins. The Longing for Less tries to understand the current obsession with minimalism in all its complexity: the influence of Silicon Valley, yes, but also capitalism, the economy in the early 2000s, Stoic philosophy, Marie Kondo. Over four chapters—”Reduction,” “Emptiness,” “Silence,” and “Shadows”—Chayka takes the reader through history and around the world, giving equal consideration to minimalists like Steve Jobs (who lived in a giant house that remained entirely empty) as he does to Cicero.

It would be a mistake to take The Longing for Less as a work of pragmatic advice. It makes neither a compelling argument for or against minimalism in practice. As for technology, Chayka includes a few anecdotes about taming it in his own life: Throughout the book, he mentions experiences turning off his Wi-Fi, visiting a sensory deprivation tank, and spending $700 on a retreat in rural Sweden where he is forced to surrender all devices for a week. By the end of the book, he doesn’t seem to find nirvana in all the silence—but he gives readers a few reasons to hold off on buying that new iPhone.

What to do when you’ve broken your Twitter habit and stripped down your device arsenal? Practice paying attention. In You’re Not Listening (out January 7), journalist Kate Murphy describes inattentiveness as one of the worst offenses of a world filled with phones. “We pass around a phone to look at pictures instead of describing what we’ve seen or experienced. Rather than finding shared humor in conversation, we show one another internet memes and YouTube videos. And if there is a difference of opinion, Google is the arbiter,” Murphy writes. After about 30 seconds of a boring story, we steal a glance at our text messages, sports scores, or what’s trending on Twitter.

Murphy’s book neatly categorizes the problems of this epidemic of inattention (loneliness, political upheaval, feeling misunderstood) and then weaves together neuroscience, psychology, and social research to describe how people can learn to listen better. Each chapter offers a lesson in listening from a different unlikely source: what we can learn from toddlers, from bartenders, from CIA agents, from priests. While Murphy is critical of technology, especially as a driver of poor listening habits, the book makes no prescriptions to abandon devices altogether. The problem isn’t Twitter per se; it’s logging onto Twitter to shout into the void, rather than taking the time to consider, and reply to, someone’s shared thought.

None of these books suggest jettisoning our phones entirely. None of them even directly claim to improve our relationship with technology. That sets them apart from many of last year’s titles, which offered prescriptive advice on dodging distractions and regaining control. Odell’s How to Do Nothing, a delightful read on techno-escapism, included long meditations on sitting in a rose garden, screen-free. This year’s new books offer no such instructions. The overarching shift seems to be toward living peacefully with our technology, rather than striving to avoid it.

Rehabilitating that relationship still requires some effort. For those with a 2020 resolution to live differently with personal technology—by mastering choice, consumption, or attention—these books can be a place to start. At the very least, reading them gives you an excuse to put down your phone for a minute.

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