Home > Work > Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
81 " 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? "
― Cal Newport , Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
82 " What's making us uncomfortable...is this feeling of losing control - a feeling that instantiates itself in a dozen different ways each day, such as when we tune out with our phone during our child's bath time, or lose our ability to enjoy a nice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience. "
83 " You can't, in other words, build a billion dollar empire like Facebook if you're wasting hours every day using a service like Facebook. "
84 " For many people, their compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life. Reducing the easy distraction without also filling the void can make life unpleasantly stale. "
85 " 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. "
86 " 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. "
87 " Simply put, humans are not wired to be constantly wired. "
88 " Solitude Deprivation A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds. "
89 " 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. "
90 " 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. "
91 " 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. "
92 " All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone, "
93 " 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. "
94 " 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. "
95 " how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval. "
96 " Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption. "
97 " Leave good evidence of yourself. Do good work. "
98 " 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. "
99 " Marcus Aurelius asked: “You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? "
100 " 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. "