Ascetic Computing

I’ve come up with a list of principles that are the basis for my ascetic computing.

Before I give you the list, understand that I mostly live by these principles, but not always. Just search for "Faust" and "Faustian" on this page.

Here’s what "ascetic computing" means to me:

What’s interesting is that the word computer does not appear even once. Someone 200 years ago probably would have understood my list, and could comprehend, after a moment of pause, the modern idioms "Fear of Missing Out" and "Shiny Things".

All three of these principles are challenging, but I think the Shiny Things are my final boss. I’m one of those people who follows the links on Wikipedia and finds themselves with 30 tabs open an hour later. Or who buys supplies for hobbies with the full intention of doing that hobby for the rest of my life. And then…​doesn’t.

(Yes, I used to learn a lot of subjects, but the problem with Shiny Things is that when I was always chasing the new fashions in computing, I never gave myself a chance to dive deeply into the things I really cared about. Of course, you first have to figure out what you really care about, so I think you probably should look at the Shiny Things when you’re starting out. What is shiny now may become a well-worn old favorite a decade from now.)

Anyway, I’d like to point out that deprivation is not on the list. A certain amount of deprivation may occur as a result of following the three principles, but it’s not the goal.

The goal is to live a (computing) life of principle, purpose, and focus.

(Sketchbook drawing by the author with black and gray liner pens.)

I have adored the following Flaubert quote ever since I was introduced to it in a book chapter titled "Be Boring" by Austin Kleon (austinkleon.com):

I’m at the point in my life where I’d rather spend my creative energy on a project of my own creation than fighting my operating system and tools.

I’d rather do without a few conveniences if it means less complications and breakages and distractions.

I love learning new things. But at some point, it began to dawn on me that my learning often went into one of two categories:

Learning proprietary software has tended to go into the first category.

Learning BIOS/UEFI settings and hardware minutia has largely gone into the first category (and it stinks because sometimes you practically have to make a pact with demons for that information).

Learning the fundamentals of programming goes in the second category.

Learning Unix fundamentals, including programs that have been around since the 1970s goes in the second category.

Note my use of the word "fundamentals" in those last two items.

I’ll invoke the Lindy effect (wikipedia.org) which seems, in my experience, to hold true:

The vi editor was released in 1976. 50 years ago! People still use it every single day. It well may go on for another 50.

(As for the staying power of 1970s technology, trust me, I find it just as perverse as you do that I’m still using techniques and tools that were first created for teletype terminals that printed output on actual rolls of paper. But it is what it is. Text interfaces have a ridiculously low-barrier for creating, modifying, and combining programs. As devices have changed, the text stuff just keeps working.)

In the arts, I find this very similar to learning the fundamentals of drawing or writing. Practice these things and they’ll pay off forever.

Another quote from the Wikipedia article on asceticism:

The good stuff is in that apparent paradox: constraints = freedom.

It is a well-known phenomena in the art world that limitations can be our greatest creative allies. Forcing yourself to use one brush or only create with materials you can find around the house can be a fantastic way to break through a creative rut.

It’s the same thing in computing. The first chapter of the book Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley describes a sorting problem with a hardware constraint of limited memory. Had the memory not been constrained, the obvious answer would have been to use a regular library sort routine. But the constraint forced a creative solution that fit the problem’s exactly requirements - populating a large bit field, which was not memory efficient, but had the pleasant side effect of also being an order of magnitude faster than an ordinary sort. We’ll revisit programming in a moment.

When everything is available and there are no limits, it can be terrible for your creative thinking.

Have you ever spent more time scrolling through the enormous number of options on a movie streaming service than actually watching a movie? I never had that problem when I was a teenager with a dozen well-worn VHS tapes of my favorite movies. I just picked one and watched it.

I’ve driven myself to distraction chasing the right text editor, command shell, Linux distro, window manager, and…​ color scheme, for goodness’s sake!

NOTE: To be clear, there is absolutely nothing wrong with playing with setups and just having fun with computers! This article isn’t about "productivity". It’s about being able to focus on what YOU want to do!

I initially cast my net widely and found out what I liked. When I was ready to concentrate on my own work, I did my best to learn how to stick with my choices.

It’s almost always been a better use of my time to learn how to accomplish what I wanted within the limitations of my chosen tools rather than give in to temptation and answer the siren call of the search for The One True Tool.

Read even more about sticking with it here in this new card because this page is already plenty long.

The other day, someone said to me, "Have you been seeing the advertisements for [whatever it was]?"

And I realized that not only had I not seen those advertisements, I haven’t seen virtually any advertisements in recent memory. Of course, some sneak through in magazines and billboards and that sort of thing. (You’d have to live in the woods to avoid them entirely.)

The longer I go without sitting through advertisements, the more resistant to them I become. (By contrast, ads in printed material are pretty easy to ignore.) At this point, I basically refuse to watch anything or listen to anything that makes me sit through ads. Not even podcasts I otherwise enjoy. I just can’t do it anymore.

Does this sound like a brag?

I absolutely miss out on stuff because of this stance.

Sometimes I wish I wasn’t missing out on those things.

But I do find it gets easier to make that sort of choice as I get older.

Not to get too philosophical, but being able to do without things is another way of saying "be content with what you have," which is a /.well-known/ path to True Happiness.

Obligatory Oscar Wilde quote:

And, look, I think that’s right. But it’s like Morpheus said about the Matrix, "Unfortunately, no one can be told what [being happy with what you have] is. You have to [experience] it for yourself."

This isn’t just about consuming media, either. This applies to doing without software and operating systems and websites that violate your personal principals. If you forgo them, you will absolutely miss out on some things.

But you can pick and choose your compromises. I’ve made my Faustian bargains in computing just like everyone else (Valve’s Steam isn’t libre, and stock Android is something I begrudgingly live with on my phone). That’s where having separate computers is great! (More on that in Maximalism below.)

Quoting Wikipedia once again:

Writing and programming are both exercises that help me organize my thoughts as well as create new things. Using minimal tools and using them frequently is a way to keep my brain sharp. The more I practice, the better I get at it and so the more I want to practice. A cycle!

There’s a back-and-forth between thought and action for which there is no shortcut. We develop our ability to have deep thought by the practice of thinking.

As Tugba writes in think until you can think no more (tugbakibar.pro):

I believe that simple and minimal tools give no illusion of productivity. The tool cuts the groove or stamps the letter or tightens the bolt. But you provide the motive and the effort. You do the thinking. In exchange, the outcome is an extension of you.

In other words, you get what you put in. It is a simple and ancient arrangement.

I mentioned a programming briefly above in the context of limitations.

While writing this page, I discovered a book titled The Ascetic Programmer: How asceticism benefits programming, science, and the arts by Antonio Piccolboni.

I read it and enjoyed it. My review (and links to the book) here:

Dave’s book review for The Ascetic Programmer

I’ll repeat one of my favorite quotes here:

I started programming computers near the end of the 3.5" floppy era and call me old-fashioned, but I’ve never forgotten how much amazing stuff you can fit within that 1.44 Mb limit.

Some other things I’ve previously written in this vein:

In the age of the pocket supercomputer, I still program as if every Kb matters because, actually, it does, darnit! See my 'Why?' section here, for example.

If you limit yourself to smaller, I think it’s highly likely that you’ll also make it better.

I would like to convince you that this asceticism I’m describing is:

I’ve used words like "minimal" to describe my computing habits and there’s a lot of truth in that. I do like using a small set of tools and I’ve settled into sticking with defaults settings as much as possible. I like being unencumbered by heavy setup. I can be productive on a new Unix-like system pretty much right away.

But I wouldn’t describe my computing situation as minimalist per se. Not exactly.

Also, are you still picturing a joyless existence of deprivation over here in Ratfactor land? Okay, here is my last attempt to change your mental picture by briefly describing my home computer maximalism.

As I wrote four years ago in the card Computers as Workspaces, I really enjoy having a bunch of separate computers around for different tasks.

More cheap little computers have come into this house since I wrote that card and none have left.

There’s a set of common properties shared by nearly all of these computers: they’re pre-owned, inexpensive, have no ongoing costs to own while they’re powered down, and have no licensing fees, subscriptions, or external dependencies. They’re just little microworlds or forever worlds sitting around, waiting to be fired up again for another adventure.

In other words, I’ve:

It feels a lot to me like the original design sense of maximalism: "more is more". It’s the same feeling I get with my book collection. Yes, I have a ton of books, but it’s one type of thing and it doesn’t bother me the way clutter (a lot of different things) does.

To most people, I have an unusual number of computers. But to me, this is still an ascetic collection because it’s nearly all following my principles.

(I keep saying "nearly" and "almost". Another advantage to multiple computers is that you can temporarily "sacrifice" some of them to unprincipled computing in exchange for convenience. The Faust of legend traded worldly pleasure and knowledge for his entire soul. A single computer or cell phone running an unprincipled operating system is not nearly so dire a covenant.)

Think of it this way: my computers are like a little electronic garden where most of the plants are dormant most of the time. I am my house’s happy little garden hermit (wikipedia.org). You wouldn’t pity the gardener with a colorful collection of flowers and shrubs and trees, would you?

It’s joy and fun. I hope you can picture it.

(Sketchbook drawing by the author, fountain pen.)

And speaking of my happy little garden of used computers, that brings me to the final point:

I think we are very fortunate that Moore’s Law gave up the ghost after we achieved a level of cheap and reliable computation that, in my humble (but firm) opinion, satisfies everything a home computer user might reasonably want to do.

I realize saying that is just begging for people to come at me with the legend, possibly fiction, (computerworld.com) of Bill Gates saying, "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

But while no one could deny that computers were extremely limited in the everyday tasks they could do in 1981, in part because of limited main memory, I am not convinced we’re similarly constrained now.

One of my daily drivers is a 8 year old Lenovo 11E ("Education Series") with a Celeron N3450 CPU and 8Gb RAM, which was "underpowered" when it was brand new, "more underpowered" when I bought it used 4 years ago, and "woefully underpowered" now. I pay more to take the family for a modest meal at a restaurant than I paid for this computer. And yet, it’s perfectly capable of any normal home computing tasks you might wish to perform. Is that not incredible?

Are there things I can’t do on this computer? Of course! It’s not great for: modern 3D rendering, contemporary scientific simulations (e.g. weather, nuclear), or playing triple-A first person shooter games made in the last decade. Sometimes you actually need more power.

But what I can do on this old thing is edit documents, develop software, perform enormous mathematical calculations, process billions of records, and generally perform any action you’d expect to be able to do on a room-filling nation-scale supercomputer laboratory 30 years ago. Again, I posit this is enough for most home computing needs!

In a loose way:

We live in an era of unbelievable computing opulence.

Doing productive things on on my computers is lightning fast. I’ve made computing sacrifices, but speed is not one of them. The amount of time I spend waiting for the computer is measured in milliseconds. The rest of the time, the computer is waiting for me.

That’s what I’m talking about when I say we’ve already reached cheap, reliable computing hardware for home use. You just have to make the right software choices.

Strong opinion warning: Unless you’re a very serious gamer, visual artist, musician, or other specialty where you need extremely powerful real-time processing, the era of frequently replacing your computer hardware to improve its capability is practically over for the time being. Am I scolding? Fine, I’m scolding.

And if you get into retrocomputing, here’s another bonus for truly old and "obsolete" computers: they suck at rendering social media websites.

Going offline. Now that’s ascetic computing. Disconnecting for a little while. Going inward.

In this cursed year 2026, I’m adding more drawings to my posts. And below every single one, I’m writing a little bit about the drawing so that you know I drew it myself.

Sometimes I have an idea for a web page and I dash something off same-day, but often I’m drafting, thinking, and incubating for a while. I think of things when I’m away from the computer (often at very inconvenient times) and I write them in my pocket notebook. And I doodle.

(Sketchbook pages: The other drawings I did while I was mulling over this page. Two are in watercolor, but I thought black and white and grayscale ultimately worked better. These are all from a very small sketchbook I’m nearly done filling.)

The doodles were always just for me, but I’ve realized they add a little more "flavor" to the writing. So why not? This page took a while, so I had plenty of opportunity to refine my doodles a bit.

I guess I just want you to know I wrote this, I drew this. And most importantly, you are reading actual thoughts from an actual person.

Anyway, that’s where the drawings are coming from.