Digital Minimalism
Metadata
- Author: Cal Newport
Highlights
what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else. There
experienced massively positive changes by ruthlessly reducing their time spent online to focus on a small number of high-value activities.
the declutter gives you the space to refine your understanding of the things you value most.
“ The killer app is making calls,” Jobs exclaimed to applause during his keynote. It’s not until thirty-three minutes into that famed presentation that he gets around to highlighting features like improved text messaging and mobile internet access that dominate the way we now use these devices.
who picked up an iPhone in 2007 for the music features would be less enthusiastic if told that within a decade he could expect to compulsively check the device eighty-five times a day—a “feature” we now know Steve Jobs never considered as he prepared his famous keynote. These changes crept up on us and happened fast, before we had a chance to step back and ask what we really wanted out of the rapid advances of the past decade. We added new technologies to the periphery of our experience for minor reasons, then woke one morning to discover that they had colonized the core of our daily life. We didn’t, in other words, sign up for the digital world in which we’re currently entrenched; we seem to have stumbled backward into it.
Is this true of LLM? What do we want out of them? How do we get the “killer phone app” for them?
utility—providing case studies, for example, of a struggling artist finding an audience through social media,* or WhatsApp connecting a deployed soldier with her family back home. They then conclude that it’s incorrect to dismiss these technologies on the grounds that they’re useless, a tactic that is usually sufficient to end the debate.
We make a similar argument now for LLM, though reversed - they make us obsoletr, they do it all for us, they increase productivity.
unease is not evident in these thin-sliced case studies, but instead becomes visible only when confronting the thicker reality of how these technologies as a whole have managed to expand beyond the minor roles for which we initially adopted them.
What’s making us uncomfortable, in other words, 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.
Well, shit…
It’s not about usefulness, it’s about autonomy.
When the American Psychiatric Association published its fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) in 2013, it included, for the first time, behavioral addiction as a diagnosable problem.
Wild that addiction wasnt included before
intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.
rewards delivered unpredictably are far more enticing than those delivered with a known pattern.
Many people have the experience of visiting a content website for a specific purpose—say, for example, going to a newspaper site to check the weather forecast—and then find themselves thirty minutes later still mindlessly following trails of links, skipping from one headline to another.
most articles end up duds, but occasionally you’ll land on one that creates a strong emotion, be it righteous anger or laughter.
early social media sites featured very little feedback—their operations focused instead on posting and finding information. It tends to be these early, pre-feedback-era features that people cite when explaining why social media is important to their life.
drive to regulate social approval helps explain the current obsession among teenagers to maintain Snapchat “streaks” with their friends, as a long unbroken streak of daily communication is a satisfying confirmation that the relationship is strong. It also explains the universal urge to immediately answer an incoming text, even in the most inappropriate or dangerous conditions
Our Paleolithic brain categorizes ignoring a newly arrived text the same as snubbing the tribe member trying to attract your attention by the communal fire: a potentially dangerous social faux pas.
our current unease with new technologies is not really about whether or not they’re useful. It’s instead about autonomy.
We signed up for these services and bought these devices for minor reasons—to look up friends’ relationship statuses or eliminate the need to carry a separate iPod and phone—and
This is why the critical separation Dylan talks Bout is too heavy handed
When we increasingly cede autonomy to the digital, we energize the latter horse and make the chariot driver’s struggle to steer increasingly difficult—a diminishing of our soul’s authority.
Again, I question the attack on all digital services. A Kindle is digital, yet doesnt bot do the same as Facebook
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.
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.
Is this the best way to use technology to support this value? If the answer is no, the minimalist will set to work trying to optimize the tech, or search out a better option.
His decision to leave these services, however, was about more than a tweak to his digital habits; it was a symbolic gesture that reinforced his new commitment to the minimalist philosophy of working backward from your deeply held values when deciding how to live your life.
Or an issue of decision fatigue : the will every time to not do the easy thing is draining.
cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates an overall negative cost that can swamp the small benefits
To truly extract its full potential benefit, it’s necessary to think carefully about how they’ll use the technology.
significant satisfaction from their general commitment to being more intentional about how they engage with new technologies.
Thoreau, we imagine, was seeking to be transformed by the subjective experience of living deliberately—planning to walk out of the woods changed by transcendence.
”we imagine”
How much of his time must be sacrificed to support his minimalist lifestyle? After plugging in the numbers gathered during his experiment, he determined that hiring out his labor only one day per week would be sufficient.
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.”
Thoreau’s new economics considers such math woefully incomplete, as it leaves out the cost in life required to achieve that extra $59 in monetary profit.
Yes! Wlden economics is why i chose to quit, why i dont want to be pilot, why the life of money rot brains is so disheartening.
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.
This does not i.mply cutting stuff used for comunication with good friends. Note that always on availability is a sifferent issue, however → Discord.
ref the Good Life
Finding useful new technologies is just the first step to improving your life. The real benefits come once you start experimenting with how best to use them.
Useful including old, think RSS and the separation between fire hose feeds and weekly summaries
Their gamble is that intention trumps convenience—and this is a bet that seems to be paying off. The Amish have
At the end of the break, reintroduce optional technologies into your life, starting from a blank slate.
A typical culprit, for example, was technology restriction rules that were either too vague or too strict. Another mistake was not planning what to replace these technologies with during the declutter period—leading to anxiety and boredom.
you think these games are a nontrivial part of your life, feel free to put them on the list of technologies you’re evaluating when figuring out your declutter rules.
consider the technology optional unless its temporary removal would harm or significantly disrupt the daily operation of your professional or personal life.
Losing lightweight contact with your international friends might help clarify which of these friendships were real in the first place, and strengthen your relationships with those who remain.
Sure, but co tact and nurturing is still relevant. Nonetheless, i do see the benefit of forcing longer comms