The joy of (sort of) missing out

09 Jun, 2026

After a month-long hiatus, I have risen from the dead to tackle another Bear Blog Carnival entry, this time hosted by Juni. Her full prompt is: “How do you stay connected while practicing digital minimalism, and how did you make the switch?” A pertinent topic, and one that I’m sure will resonate with those of us that are still blogging in 2026.

In my early teens, during COVID lockdowns, I stumbled upon Cal Newport’s blog and his book Digital Minimalism. I have been enamored by the concept ever since. I think of it in a Marie Kondo sort of way: intentionally curating my online activities to keep only those that spark joy, and discarding everything that doesn’t.

This is the part where I would love to say that I’m a monkmoding digital minimalist Gigachad with about 30 seconds of screen time a day, with nary a wrinkle of my brain touched by the evils of ragebait. That is not the case, but I am trying my best to remedy that.

As Juni has pointed out in her post, there are two main aspects to staying connected:

1. With people: catching up with friends and family, spending quality time, deepening your relationships…
2. With the world: staying decently well-informed on regional/world events, being somewhat updated on pop culture etc.

In the following sections, I’ll hash out my whole thought process on how I try to accomplish both while keeping things intentional and not frying my brain.

Connecting with people I know

To me, this is the most important (and joy-sparking) aspect of staying connected. To paraphrase Newport’s book, talking face to face is superior to focused, high-quality online activities (e.g. video/voice call), which are both superior to diffuse texting. So I aspire towards maximizing in-person contact where possible, which is still a work in progress for my anxious, introverted self.

On texting

In an ideal world, I’d limit texting to arranging hangouts. In reality, a good chunk of my friends have either moved away or were only online to begin with. In those cases, I’m more comfortable hopping into voice and text conversations to keep that connection.

I’d love for a mass exodus from WhatsApp to Signal, but it seems that’s just not happening here. It took a lot of persuading to get just my immediate family to move, along with a handful of people (including one in the past week — small win?). So I’ve accepted my fate; at least I don’t need a Meta account for WhatsApp right now.

I still keep Discord around, as much as it’s been getting enshittified. There are certain circles I’m in that still talk on there, including my HS friend group who I game with (across four time zones). And admittedly, it is decent for voice chat and screen sharing. The issue is that I could hop into any server and scratch my brain with a constant flow of new messages and drama, so I ended up pruning servers that weren’t worth my time and deleting the app off my phone. Matrix is a viable alternative, which I use and enjoy, but it is a bit scuffed and an even tougher sell than Signal in that regard. Oh, well.

On “social” media

I feel strongly that we must free ourselves of the obligation to scroll past every acquaintance’s vacations and meals and thirst traps and crash-outs and call that “keeping up”. I am more than happy to miss out on all that. If I actually wanted to get an update on someone’s life, I’d rather reach out (or look them up). It’s one thing to exchange small talk, and another to be a passive recipient of the feed, constantly pulling the slot machine until I get a kernel of valuable info.

I’ve reluctantly kept only Instagram, using a mod that lets me disable everything but profile viewing and DMs. Somehow, a good number of those I know will only reliably reply on there (God knows why). And peer pressure at university is a bitch, so I’ve settled for having something to give out to people. My method of harm reduction is not having personal info on there, at least.

Connecting with the world

It’s unnerving that most people around me seem to get their news from Instagram, Threads, or their YouTube recommendations. I won’t even get into how much I despise short form content. It’s not like traditional news media is free of clickbait and propaganda, but at least I, and not a shitty algo, get to curate what sources show up on my RSS feed.

I used to wall myself off even more, believe it or not. For a blissful few years, I barely learned of any news or cultural happenings unless they were brought up directly to my face. This changed earlier this year when I decided to try out a feed reader. These days, I follow around a dozen blogs and a handful of literary magazines on RSS. I’m pretty aggressive about unsubbing from blogs that I don’t care to read anymore, even if I still like the people who wrote them. I also subscribe to a weekly digest e-mail from a local newspaper. I suppose I like to take it slow.

As for YouTube, I figured out a few months ago that disabling watch history would essentially nuke the home page.¹ Evidently Google is trying to get people to keep it enabled, but that happens to work in my favor. It’s nice to log on to YouTube on any device and be greeted by my subscriptions page and nothing else. I’m only subbed to cat videos, wildlife content, and Tasting History (my new favorite channel) — channels I actually care about and enjoy watching. (I probably could replace my YT account with RSS, but I do like being able to organize videos into playlists, a feature I use quite often.)

How much am I missing out on?

I have no idea, because ignorance is bliss. Between connecting with people I know and connecting with the world, I care a lot more about the former, considering the effects of being too “plugged in”.

I noticed that “online” stuff tends to leak into real life these days, especially since Threads became the dominant form of social media here while I stubbornly refused to create an account. Another aspect of this is likely attributable to my age, but interpersonal happenings on Instagram get brought up quite often (life updates, stories, soft launches, unfollows…). If I’m not actively talking to someone, there’s a good chance I have no clue what’s going on in their life, while other people still might come across the odd Instagram post.

I won’t lie, sometimes I get self-conscious about my cluelessness, even if the topics are relatively inane. A lot of the time, I’m banking on the fact that anything I ought to know about would naturally come up by word of mouth. There might be a method to expressing curiosity in conversation that is endearing rather than infuriating, in hopes that people would want to yap and get me up to speed. But I’ve also seen people respond with incredulousness or impatience. So there is an undeniable tradeoff, but it’s one that I ultimately think is worth it.

Addendum: Managing screen time and distractions

If you’re anything like me, your brain has already been fried enough that you fall into rabbit holes on autopilot without even noticing. I decided to put this part at the end, since I think it’s only tangential to the topic, and most people reading this will likely already be familiar with these techniques.

The biggest, simplest change I made when I was 14 was disabling notifications on my phone across the board. That is, except from sources that require my urgent attention (family group chat, school email, weather warnings). I only had to do it once, so I never really think about it, but I was updating my grandma’s phone recently and the sheer number of notifs was anxiety-inducing. I strongly recommend protecting your peace.

Something I’ve been experimenting with recently is setting app limits. I’ve built up skepticism to them over the years since I’m prone to getting frustrated and disabling them altogether. Also, a lot of fully-featured Android solutions operate under a subscription model. But since I read this article on TimeLimit (Android) from the Privacy Dad, I finally sucked it up and found apps that would let me hand the reins to someone else.

I use the aforementioned TimeLimit on Android. For PC, I forked over the one-time payment for Cold Turkey. All settings changes are locked down and I handed over the passwords to my younger sister, who is really more than happy to indulge/sabotage me. On my phone, I get an hour of messaging and 30 min of browser use per day. Browser sessions are capped at 10 minutes before a forced 10-minute break to discourage pointless rabbit holes. On my PC, I have a 30-minute time limit on distracting sites and apps. If I need to focus, I have a toggleable block with only a whitelist of allowed sites. I might update this blog with how this works out for me.

#bearblog-carnival #blog