Home > Work > Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
101 " The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, . . . was all about: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. "
― Cal Newport , Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
102 " when you avoid solitude, you miss out on the positive things it brings you: the ability to clarify hard problems, to regulate your emotions, to build moral courage, and to strengthen relationships. "
103 " 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. "
104 " 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. "
105 " He asks us to treat the minutes of our life as a concrete and valuable substance—arguably the most valuable substance we possess—and to always reckon with how much of this life we trade for the various activities we allow to claim our time. "
106 " 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. "
107 " Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis. "
108 " 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. "
109 " Assume, for example, that your Twitter habit effectively consumes ten hours per week. Thoreau would note that this cost is almost certainly way too high for the limited benefits it returns. If you value new connections and exposure to interesting ideas, he might argue, why not adopt a habit of attending an interesting talk or event every month, and forcing yourself to chat with at least three people while there? This would produce similar types of value but consume only a few hours of your life per month, leaving you with an extra thirty-seven hours to dedicate to other meaningful pursuits. "
110 " The more time you spend “connecting” on these services, the more isolated you’re likely to become. "
111 " this irresistible attraction to screens is leading people to feel as though they’re ceding more and more of their autonomy when it comes to deciding how they direct their attention. No one, of course, signed up for this loss of control. They downloaded the apps and set up accounts for good reasons, only to discover, with grim irony, that these services were beginning to undermine the very values that made them appealing in the first place: "
112 " Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough). Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it’s not, replace it with something better). Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it. "
113 " the cumulative cost of the noncrucial things we clutter our lives with can far outweigh the small benefits each individual piece of clutter promises. "
114 " In the middle of a busy workday, or after a particularly trying morning of childcare, it’s tempting to crave the release of having nothing to do—whole blocks of time with no schedule, no expectations, and no activity beyond whatever seems to catch your attention in the moment. These decompression sessions have their place, but their rewards are muted, as they tend to devolve toward low-quality activities like mindless phone swiping and half-hearted binge-watching. "
115 " Examples similar to those given above are voluminous and point to a clear conclusion: regular doses of solitude, mixed in with our default mode of sociality, are necessary to flourish as a human being. It’s more urgent now than ever that we recognize this fact, because, as I’ll argue next, for the first time in human history solitude is starting to fade away altogether. "
116 " the second force that encourages behavioral addiction: the drive for social approval. As Adam Alter writes: “We’re social beings who can’t ever completely ignore what other people think of us.”18 This behavior, of course, is adaptive. In Paleolithic times, it was important that you carefully managed your social standing with other members of your tribe because your survival depended on it. "
117 " The Digital Declutter Process Put aside a thirty-day period during which you will take a break from optional technologies in your life. During this thirty-day break, explore and rediscover activities and behaviors that you find satisfying and meaningful. At the end of the break, reintroduce optional technologies into your life, starting from a blank slate. For each technology you reintroduce, determine what value it serves in your life and how specifically you will use it so as to maximize this value. Much "
118 " Compulsive use, in this context, is not the result of a character flaw, but instead the realization of a massively profitable business "
119 " As Harris argues, these companies didn’t invest the massive resources necessary to perfect this auto-tagging feature because it was somehow crucial to their social network’s usefulness. They instead made this investment so they could significantly increase the amount of addictive nuggets of social approval that their apps could deliver to their users. "
120 " By working backward from their deep values to their technology choices, digital minimalists transform these innovations from a source of distraction into tools to support a life well lived. By doing so, they break the spell that has made so many people feel like they’re losing control to their screens. "