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Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (Cal Newport)
- Running is cheaper than therapy.
- Leave good evidence of yourself. Do good work.
- Simply put, humans are not wired to be constantly wired.
- Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.
- Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.
- The more time you spend connecting on these services, the more isolated you’re likely to become.
- Marcus Aurelius asked: You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?
- Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.
- how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.
- The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
- Where we want to be cautious . . . is when the sound of a voice or a cup of coffee with a friend is replaced with ‘likes’ on a post.
- Solitude Deprivation A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.
- All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone, Blaise Pascal famously wrote in the late seventeenth century.
- Who could justify trading a lifetime of stress and backbreaking labor for better blinds? Is a nicer-looking window treatment really worth so much of your life?
- minimalists don’t mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.
- Digital minimalism definitively does not reject the innovations of the internet age, but instead rejects the way so many people currently engage with these tools.
- Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences—wherever you happen to be.
- To reestablish control, we need to move beyond tweaks and instead rebuild our relationship with technology from scratch, using our deeply held values as a foundation.
- Phones have become woven into a fraught sense of obligation in friendship. . . . Being a friend means being on call—tethered to your phone, ready to be attentive, online.
- We didn’t sign up for the digital lives we now lead. They were instead, to a large extent, crafted in boardrooms to serve the interests of a select group of technology investors.
- The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life.
- It’s easy to be seduced by the small amounts of profit offered by the latest app or service, but then forget its cost in terms of the most important resource we possess: the minutes of our life.
- It’s now possible to completely banish solitude from your life. Thoreau and Storr worried about people enjoying less solitude. We must now wonder if people might forget this state of being altogether.
- If you’re wearing headphones, or monitoring a text message chain, or, God forbid, narrating the stroll on Instagram—you’re not really walking, and therefore you’re not going to experience this practice’s greatest benefits.
- Digital Minimalism A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.
- Face-to-face conversation is the most human and humanizing thing we do. Fully present to one another, we learn to listen. It’s where we develop the capacity for empathy. It’s where we experience the joy of being heard, of being understood.
- Outsourcing your autonomy to an attention economy conglomerate—as you do when you mindlessly sign up for whatever new hot service emerges from the Silicon Valley venture capitalist class—is the opposite of freedom, and will likely degrade your individuality.
- The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let’s face it, checking your likes is the new smoking.
- Because digital minimalists spend so much less time connected than their peers, it’s easy to think of their lifestyle as extreme, but the minimalist would argue that this perception is backward: what’s extreme is how much time everyone else spends staring at their screens.
- You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types of rich interactions to which we’ve painstakingly adapted over millennia. Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.
- By removing your ability to access social media at any moment, you reduce its ability to become a crutch deployed to distract you from bigger voids in your life. At the same time, you’re not necessarily abandoning these services. By allowing yourself access (albeit less convenient) through a web browser, you preserve your ability to use specific features that you identify as important to your life—but on your own terms.
- We require a philosophy that puts our aspirations and values once again in charge of our daily experience, all the while dethroning primal whims and the business models of Silicon Valley from their current dominance of this role; a philosophy that accepts new technologies, but not if the price is the dehumanization Andrew Sullivan warned us about; a philosophy that prioritizes long-term meaning over short-term satisfaction.
- Digital minimalists see new technologies as tools to be used to support things they deeply value—not as sources of value themselves. They don’t accept the idea that offering some small benefit is justification for allowing an attention-gobbling service into their lives, and are instead interested in applying new technology in highly selective and intentional ways that yield big wins. Just as important: they’re comfortable missing out on everything else.
- This strategy is classic digital minimalism. By removing your ability to access social media at any moment, you reduce its ability to become a crutch deployed to distract you from bigger voids in your life. At the same time, you’re not necessarily abandoning these services. By allowing yourself access (albeit less convenient) through a web browser, you preserve your ability to use specific features that you identify as important to your life—but on your own terms.
- As Virginia Woolf argues in her 1929 feminist manifesto, A Room of One’s Own, this imbalance should not come as a surprise. Woolf would agree that solitude is a prerequisite for original and creative thought, but she would then add that women had been systematically denied both the literal and figurative room of their own in which to cultivate this state. To Woolf, in other words, solitude is not a pleasant diversion, but instead a form of liberation from the cognitive oppression that results in its absence.
- To be clear, conversation-centric communication requires sacrifices. If you adopt this philosophy, you’ll almost certainly reduce the number of people with whom you have an active relationship. Real conversation takes time, and the total number of people for which you can uphold this standard will be significantly less than the total number of people you can follow, retweet, like, and occasionally leave a comment for on social media, or ping with the occasional text. Once you no longer count the latter activities as meaningful interaction, your social circle will seem at first to contract.
- Being less available over text, in other words, has a way of paradoxically strengthening your relationship even while making you (slightly) less available to those you care about. This point is crucial because many people fear that their relationships will suffer if they downgrade this form of lightweight connection. I want to reassure you that it will instead strengthen the relationships you care most about. You can be the one person in their life who actually talks to them on a regular basis, forming a deeper, more nuanced relationship than any number of exclamation points and bitmapped emojis can provide.
- When an entire cohort unintentionally eliminated time alone with their thoughts from their lives, their mental health suffered dramatically. On reflection, this makes sense. These teenagers have lost the ability to process and make sense of their emotions, or to reflect on who they are and what really matters, or to build strong relationships, or even to just allow their brains time to power down their critical social circuits, which are not meant to be used constantly, and to redirect that energy to other important cognitive housekeeping tasks. We shouldn’t be surprised that these absences lead to malfunctions.
