I Deleted 47 Apps to Become a Minimalist and Now I Have 47 Aesthetic Spreadsheets Instead
Let me paint you a picture. It's a Tuesday night. I'm sitting cross-legged on my bed, bathed in the warm glow of my laptop, sipping chamomile tea from a mug that says Simplify in a tasteful sans-serif font. My phone is in another room — intentionally, spiritually, minimally. I have never felt more at peace.
I also have six browser tabs open, all of them Google Sheets, each one color-coded in a palette I spent three hours selecting from a Notion template I paid $14 for on Etsy.
This is what $89 of digital enlightenment looks like, folks.
The Course That Started It All
It began, as most of my questionable financial decisions do, with a YouTube ad I couldn't skip fast enough. A very calm man with a Scandinavian accent and a suspiciously uncluttered desk told me that I was drowning in digital noise, and that for the low price of $89 — just $89 — he could teach me the ancient art of Digital Minimalism.
I clicked purchase before the ad even finished. Which, in retrospect, is not the behavior of someone who needs help with impulse control around screens.
The course itself was twelve modules, each one delivered via a beautifully produced video in which the instructor spoke softly about the tyranny of notifications while sitting in what appeared to be a $4,000 Herman Miller chair. The irony of consuming premium digital content about consuming less digital content did not hit me until Module 4. By Module 7, I had accepted it. By Module 9, I had monetized the feeling.
Step One: Delete Everything
The course's first directive was aggressive and I respected it: audit your apps. Delete what doesn't serve you. I went scorched earth. Gone were the food delivery apps, the social platforms I used to post photos of food I ordered via the apps I just deleted, the meditation app I opened twice, and something called "Streaks" that I had apparently been failing at for eleven months.
Forty-seven apps. Deleted. Just like that.
For approximately four hours, I felt genuinely free. The home screen of my phone looked like a Zen garden. I floated through my apartment. I made eye contact with a houseplant. I considered journaling.
Then the boredom arrived, right on schedule, like a Frontier Airlines flight that somehow shows up early just to spite you.
Step Two: Fill the Void With Something Equally Unhinged
Here's the thing nobody tells you about digital minimalism: your brain doesn't actually want less stimulation. It just wants different stimulation with better aesthetics.
Within seventy-two hours of completing the course, I had:
- Built a personal finance tracker in Google Sheets using a color palette called "Sage & Terracotta"
- Created a weekly habit dashboard in Notion with custom icons I sourced from a $7 icon pack
- Started a "life operating system" document that is, functionally, a very pretty to-do list
- Joined three subreddits dedicated to the optimization of spreadsheets
- Purchased a $14 Etsy template to make my Notion look more like the guy from the course's desk
I had not deleted my digital life. I had renovated it. I was still spending four hours a day staring at a screen — I was just doing it in a muted color palette now, which apparently makes it self-improvement.
The Aestheticization of Doing Less
Here's where it gets genuinely interesting, or at least interesting enough that I turned it into a section with a subheading.
Digital minimalism, as it's sold in the American self-optimization marketplace, has almost nothing to do with actually using less technology. It's about performing simplicity. It's a vibe. It's an identity. You're not logging off — you're curating your relationship with logging on, which sounds different but involves the same amount of screen time and significantly more smug satisfaction.
The proof is everywhere. The most popular accounts about living with less are run by people who spend considerable time producing content about living with less. The top-selling books on simplicity have companion courses, companion podcasts, companion workbooks, and companion Notion templates. The guy who told me to delete my apps has a newsletter, a YouTube channel, a podcast, a course platform, and — I checked — an Instagram account with 200,000 followers where he posts photos of his very clean desk.
We are not simplifying. We are redecorating.
What I Actually Learned
I'm not going to pretend the $89 was entirely wasted, because that would be dishonest and also I've already built my sunk cost into the Terracotta column of my personal finance tracker.
I did learn one genuinely useful thing: I have a compulsive relationship with optimization, and no amount of deleting apps will fix that, because the optimization is the app. The spreadsheet is the social media. The Notion dashboard is the doom scroll. I'm not addicted to TikTok specifically — I'm addicted to the feeling of organizing information into satisfying little boxes, and I will find that feeling in literally any digital container available to me.
Knowing this has not stopped me. But it has given me something to put in the "Insights" tab of my weekly review spreadsheet, which is color-coded in a very calming shade of blue.
A Note on Status
There's also a class dimension here that I find deeply funny. Digital minimalism, as a lifestyle aesthetic, is expensive. The clean desk requires a $4,000 chair. The phone-free weekend requires a $300-a-night cabin. The uncluttered home requires The Container Store. You don't get to opt out of consumption to achieve minimalism — you just redirect it toward higher-margin goods that signal intentionality.
My $89 course is sitting in a folder on my laptop next to a $14 Etsy template and a $7 icon pack, all of which I used to build a system designed to help me spend less money. I have not done the math on this, because the math would go in the spreadsheet, and then I'd have to pick a color for it, and honestly I don't have the bandwidth right now.
The Bottom Line
If you're thinking about buying a digital minimalism course, I want you to know two things. First: the production value is usually excellent, and you will feel briefly and genuinely inspired. Second: you will not become a minimalist. You will become a person who is very passionate about minimalism, which is a completely different and significantly busier lifestyle.
But hey. My spreadsheets look incredible. The Sage & Terracotta palette was absolutely the right call. And somewhere in a room with a very clean desk, a Scandinavian man with good lighting is nodding in quiet, profitable agreement.
