Saying No to New: A guide for ditching distractions and reclaiming your life

It was the Roomba that broke him.

The purchase of the iRobot vacuum cleaner was supposed to make life easier for Eric Athas and his family. The Weston native, a New York Times reporter and editor, lives in Brooklyn with his wife, children, and pets. During the pandemic, while everyone was living on top of each other, he bought a Roomba to vacuum the house while everyone was busy working.

It would make life easier, he thought.

“I programmed it to go while I was out at work so we would have a cleaner home,” he said.

But things did not go as smoothly as expected. Sometimes it would start cleaning at night when the family was sleeping.

“Sometimes it would suck up the strap of my kid’s backpack and then ping my wife’s phone. She would be out, so she would text me and say the vacuum’s stuck. Then I would have to respond to it.”

The technology that was meant to save time and labor ultimately took more of Athas’ time and made life more complicated, he says.

“Technology has made things better in many ways, and it has made things more convenient in lots of different ways,” he says. “But we’ve become so reliant on it that when we get these hiccups it can make life a little bit more stressful or inconvenient.”

The Roomba fiasco was one such incident that informed Athas’ new book: “Say No to New: Why New Things Are Stealing Your Time, Money and Happiness and How to Take Back Your Life,” published by Grand Central Publishing and coming out Sept. 15. Athas says the book is for anyone who is feeling overwhelmed by the overabundance of new stuff in their lives, whether it is digital content or new products to buy. It provides information on how to make smarter decisions about what to embrace and what to deflect to develop a calmer, healthier, clutter-free lifestyle.

Athas defines “the new” broadly as the latest thing we, as a society, are chasing after. It could be a new technology or phone app. It could be an object we order online before we figure out what to do with it. It could refer to an Instagram trend or even a toy that a child is clamoring to get.

“It comes in a lot of different forms and means something different depending on the person and the experiences they are having,” he says.

As a result of so much “newness,” Athas says, we are overwhelmed with abundance and decision making.

Even before the Roomba incident, Athas says he realized he was exhausting himself in the chase for the newest and most up-to-date products and technology.

“For most of my life, I’ve been a fan of new things and I was really into gadgets and technology,” he says. “I was someone who would wake up early on Apple release day, roll out of bed and get in line for the latest phone.”

Once he had children, however, he said he was introduced to a whole new realm of newness: the “child-raising economy,” the vast marketplace of new strollers and swings and gadgets, “stuff I didn’t even know existed.”

“It was the pandemic and businesses were flooding the marketplace with new things to pass the time – to fill our minds with new things to consume, new things to buy – furniture and kitchen gadgets and so forth,” he said. “I realized a lot of those things are created to solve problems but are actually creating new problems for me – whether it was clutter, or financial cost or just distraction. It was a paradox where things that were supposed to make lives better were actually making things worse or more complicated.”

Once he identified how much time, money and effort he was spending with new products, Athas began to research the impact of abundance.

Chasing “the new,” isn’t new at all, Athas learned. Through interviews with scientists, philosophers, tech insiders and others, he has learned how humans evolved to gravitate and explore the new.

“You can imagine our ancestors having to seek out new places to find food, new hunting grounds, new lands to explore and to pay attention to new noises around them to make sure they were safe. That was a very useful feature of the human experience and continues to be useful in a lot of ways in terms of innovation,” he says. “Where it becomes a problem today is we’re just bombarded by new stuff. The safe feature becomes less useful when we feel we have to explore the latest trend, and the trend changes in a week. A lot of the same human mechanisms are in place, but the environment we’re in now is very different than it was even 20 years ago.”

Once he identified the problem of chasing after newness in his own life, Athas said he actively began to try to break the cycle. Today, he says he is unlikely to upgrade a device that doesn’t need to be upgraded. He declines to purchase items with artificial intelligence-enhanced features.

“We got a new litterbox for the cat. The litter box-economy is full of AI-powered litterboxes, smart litterboxes that connect to your phone. We got the most basic version,” he says.

The same goes for his coffee maker.

“We have an old coffee maker. It works just fine. Don’t over think it,” he says.

Speaking of coffee, Athas says he wrote some of “Say No to New” at the Heirloom restaurant while visiting family in Weston. A member of Weston High School’s Class of 2004, Athas says his love of writing and reporting is deeply-rooted in his experience growing up in town.

“I fell in love with writing when I was in elementary school,” he says. “I was a quiet kid, and writing was a way I could express myself within the comfort of my own mind.”

He credits teachers Linda Butler and Peter Banker for seeing his potential. He wrote his first published article for the Town Crier and wrote for the Wildcat Tracks, the high school paper. Athas says he came out of Weston with a passion for writing, as well as a lot of support that showed him it was something he could do as a career.

For those feeling inclined to follow his model and eschew the new, Athas says just slow down. The frictionless technology of today allows consumers to order online with one click, with a credit card that is saved on the computer or phone. Remove the data, he suggests, so you have a moment to contemplate before ordering. Delete the apps that bring meaningless things into your life. Ask questions to help you make smart decisions.

“Give yourself more time to make choices about new things,” he says. “There is such a high volume of new things, hundreds of millions of new products, an infinite well of new information and content. Most of it, we don’t need or want. It’s not serving any purpose.”

“My hunch is that we’re all in this moment when we’re interrogating our relationship with digital things and products,” he said, “and I think this book can help us do that, whatever challenges we’re facing.”