As someone who is chronically online because of my work and interests, digital minimalism is something that interests me deeply and is something that I’ve tried to inculcate in my off-work hours. But if you spend any amount of time around people who talk about digital minimalism, you start hearing the same familiar pitches. Switch to a dumb phone. Delete your apps. Turn everything grayscale. If you want to go a step further, lock your phone away. The advice always sounds great until you actually try living with it. For one, my job relies on technology and communication, and I can’t exactly turn off the dial on that.Moreover, most of us cannot simply retreat from the world. We need maps, banking, authentication, messaging, and the small conveniences that make everyday life function smoothly. That tension between wanting less and needing enough is where most of these experiments fall apart. At least they do for me. You either give up too much or you fall right back into the same cycle of tapping and scrolling without even knowing it.