“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” the philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, in 1654. According to Screen Time, a recent addition to the iPhone’s operating system that purports to help users deal with the addiction to screens which the iPhone is designed to foster, my typical daily phone activity includes ninety minutes of texting, one hour of reading, another hour of e-mail, yet another hour of social media, and about seventy “pickups,” meaning that I check my phone about four times per hour. I carry my phone around with me as if it were an oxygen tank. I stare at it while I make breakfast and take out the recycling, ruining what I prize most about working from home—the sense of control, the relative peace. I have tried all sorts of things to look at screens less often: I don’t get push notifications or use Facebook or watch Instagram stories; on my home computer, I have installed a browser plug-in called StayFocusd, which turns off Twitter after forty-five minutes of daily use. On my phone, I use an app called Freedom to block social media for much of the workday. If any of my digital chastity belts malfunction, I start scrolling like a junkie, pulling myself away just long enough to send frantic e-mails to the apps’ customer service with subject lines like “Freedom not working!”

For journalists, Twitter, in particular, functions as an increasingly familiar form of contemporary labor: paid in exposure, pitched as fun. Some of us also write about the online world, making the use of social media a professional necessity. Every week, it seems, a journalist will proclaim, on Twitter, that he is leaving Twitter, or will write an op-ed about how he’s stepping away from social media—a style of essay so common that it was parodied, last month, in the Wall Street Journal. “Fifteen minutes ago, I stopped using Facebook, Instagram and Twitter,” the writer Jason Gay began. “Within seconds, I noticed I am happier, less irritable, more contemplative and balanced. I’m kinder to neighbors and pets. I’m spending more time on activities that matter.” It’s true that, after months or years of gazing at pixels and transcribing the minutiae of life, a writer contemplating a single unshared sunset can become a smug transcendentalist, high on an ephemeral taste of analog Nirvana. But it is not only journalists who are struggling to escape from the endless loop of flattery, anxiety, and distraction that social media provides. Nearly three-quarters of Americans have taken steps to distance themselves from Facebook. Entire families try to observe a “digital Sabbath.” Parents seek screen-time alternatives to the Jungian horrorscape that is children’s YouTube. And yet a mood of fidgety powerlessness continues to accumulate, like an acid snowfall on our collective mind.

According to the Georgetown computer-science professor Cal Newport, “willpower, tips, and vague resolutions are not sufficient by themselves to tame the ability of new technologies to invade your cognitive landscape.” In “Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World” (Portfolio), Newport argues that we must establish a “philosophy of technology use.” He recommends a monthlong digital detox—a Marie Kondo-like decluttering period, in which a person takes a complete break from all optional technologies. When it’s over, the digital minimalist slowly reintroduces these technologies on her own meticulous terms. She might need only an hour of Instagram each week to catch up on her favorite babies and dogs. She might, Newport suggests, prefer to hold “conversation office hours” at a local coffee shop rather than constantly text with her friends and acquaintances.

Newport defines a digital minimalist as someone who drops “low-quality activities like mindless phone swiping and halfhearted binge watching” in favor of high-value leisure activities such as board games, CrossFit, book clubs, and learning to “fix or build something every week.” The goal is a permanent change of outlook and behavior, like converting to veganism or Christianity, in service of a life that is more holistically productive—one in which we turn to digital technology only when it provides the most efficient method of serving a carefully considered personal aim. When you’re first learning to become a digital minimalist, it’s important, Newport explains, to keep doing stuff. “Reducing the easy distraction without also filling the void can make life unpleasantly stale,” he writes. Sitting quietly in a room alone is for experts.

At the beginning of March, I decided to embrace the cliché and try to follow Newport’s advice. I bought a basic watch, adjusted the settings on StayFocusd to cut my home-computer social-media allowance to fifteen minutes, and changed my Freedom settings to block Twitter and Instagram altogether. (I had already deleted both apps, but I re-downloaded and re-deleted Instagram frequently, and I used my phone’s Web browser to look at Twitter.) I vowed to leave my phone in the apartment whenever I walked my dog. It didn’t feel feasible to quit social media entirely—I am, after all, a journalist—but I wanted to stop picking up my iPhone every time I felt even a moment’s mental pause.

More than twenty years ago, the writer Michael Goldhaber observed, in Wired, that the Internet drowns its users in information while constantly increasing information production; this makes attention a scarce and desirable resource—the “natural economy of cyberspace.” Goldhaber speculated that, when the “attention economy” had matured, nearly everyone would have her own Web site, and he warned readers that “increasing demand for our limited attention will keep us from reflecting, or thinking deeply (let alone enjoying leisure).” In other words, he roughly outlined the social-media age.

Social-media companies monetize everyday selfhood: our preferences and personal data are tracked and sold to advertisers; our relationships are framed as potentially profitable conduits; we continually capture one another’s lucrative attention by performing some version of who we think we are. Over time, we have absorbed these terms and conditions: we might retain very little of the value we create, but we have allowed social media to make us feel valuable. These platforms encourage compulsive use by offering forms of social approval—likes on Facebook and Instagram, retweets on Twitter—that are intermittent and unpredictable, as though you’re playing a slot machine that tells you whether or not people love you. Dependency, eventually, assumes its own logic. Recently, vague reports circulated that Twitter was considering getting rid of likes. Users protested. If I could flip a switch that would allow me to get book recommendations from Twitter and puppy photos from Instagram without seeing how many followers I was acquiring or how many people had liked my posts, I would. It would help me waste less time on the Internet, and feel less invested in it. Of course, this would not provide me with as many regular infusions of useless dopamine, or make Twitter or Instagram—or the companies that advertise on them—very much money.

During the first few days of my Internet decluttering, I found myself compulsively checking my unchanged in-box and already-read text messages, and scanning the same headlines over and over—attempting, as if bewitched, to see new information there. I took my dog out for longer walks, initially trying to use them for some productive purpose: spying on neighbors, planning my week. Soon I acquiesced to a dull, pleasant blankness. One afternoon, I draped myself on my couch and felt an influx of mental silence that was both disturbing and hallucinatorily pleasurable. I didn’t want to learn how to fix or build anything, or start a book club. I wanted to experience myself as soft and loose and purposeless, three qualities that, in my adulthood, have always seemed economically risky.