



In Joy of Missing Out, Brinkmann, a philosopher, argues that the path to happiness is not in acquiring more but wanting less. A digital declutter is an audit of your entire digital life, followed by removing or reorganizing everything into a simpler, more secure, and more backed up system. This double-edged sword was brought home for me recently after reading three books, each about building one’s life around less: Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, Jenny O’Dell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, and Svend Brinkmann’s Joy of Missing Out: The Art of Self-Restraint in the Age of Excess. The flip side of all that digital abundance is that we often feel overwhelmed, exhausted, and burned out from it all. Our digital lives today are seemingly limitless worlds of people to follow, music to stream, articles to read, and so on.
