Digital Minimalism

by Cal Newport

Marcus Aurelius asked: “You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?”

how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.

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.

Thoreau establishes early in Walden: “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.”6,7

The striking thing with Thoreau is not the actual content of the argument.10 After all, sages in earliest Antiquity had already proclaimed their contempt for possessions. … What impresses is the form of the argument. For Thoreau’s obsession with calculation runs deep. … He says: keep calculating, keep weighing. What exactly do I gain, or lose?

Kethledge and Erwin explain, however, solitude is about what’s happening in your brain, not the environment around you. Accordingly, they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind is 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.14

Benjamin Franklin took up the subject in his journal: “I have read abundance of fine things on the subject of solitude ….15 I acknowledge solitude an agreeable refreshment to a busy mind.”

1988, the noted English psychiatrist Anthony Storr helped correct this omission with his seminal book, Solitude: A Return to the Self.

The gentle slopes of the line graphs [charting how behavioral traits change with birth year] became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear.29 In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it.

PRACTICE: LEAVE YOUR PHONE AT HOME

This rise of cell phone as vital appendage is supported by many different explanations. Young people, for example, worry that even temporary disconnection might lead them to miss out on something better they could be doing. Parents worry that their kids won’t be able to reach them in an emergency. Travelers need directions and recommendations for places to eat. Workers fear the idea of being both needed and unreachable. And everyone secretly fears being bored.

What’s remarkable about these concerns is how recently we started really caring about them. People born before the mid-1980s have strong memories of life without cell phones. All of the concerns listed above still existed in theory, but no one worried much about them.

life without a cell phone is occasionally annoying, but it’s much less debilitating than you might expect.

As Shakya summarizes: “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.”

Connection is no longer an alternative to conversation; it’s instead its supporter.

Similarly, if you adopt conversation-centric communication, you’ll still likely rely on text-messaging services to simplify information gathering, or to coordinate social events, or to ask quick questions, but you’ll no longer participate in open-ended, ongoing text-based conversations throughout your day.

We’re left, then, with a technology that’s required in your social life while simultaneously reducing the value you derive from it.

This practice suggests that you keep your phone in Do Not Disturb mode by default.

much easier to regularly enjoy rich phone conversations. I learned it from a technology executive in Silicon Valley who innovated a novel strategy for supporting high-quality interaction with friends and family: he tells them that he’s always available to talk on the phone at 5:30 p.m. on weekdays. There’s no need to schedule a conversation or let him know when you plan to call—just dial him up. As it turns out, 5:30 is when he begins his traffic-clogged commute home in the Bay Area. He decided at some point that he wanted to put this daily period of car confinement to good use, so he invented the 5:30 rule.

you write him with a somewhat complicated question, he can reply, “I’d love to get into that. Call me at 5:30 any day you want.”

a life well lived requires activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity itself generates.

If you want to succeed with digital minimalism, you cannot ignore this reality. If you begin decluttering the low-value digital distractions from your life before you’ve convincingly filled in the void they were helping you ignore, the experience will be unnecessarily unpleasant at best and a massive failure at worse.

never understood the joy of watching other people play sports, can’t stand tourist attractions, don’t sit on the beach unless there’s a really big sand castle that needs to be made, [and I] don’t care about what the celebrities and politicians are doing ….7 Instead of all this, I seem to get satisfaction only from making stuff. Or maybe a better description would be solving problems and making improvements.

Speaking to the Hamilton Club in Chicago in the spring of 1899, Theodore Roosevelt famously said: “I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.”12

What? You say that full energy given to those sixteen hours will lessen the value of the business eight?17 Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business eight. One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change—not rest, except in sleep.

He’s reworking the old entrepreneurial adage “You have to spend money to make money” into the language of personal vitality.

Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.

My core argument is that craft is a good source of high-quality leisure.

“Many people experience the world largely through a screen now,” Rogowski writes.20 “We live in a world that is working to eliminate touch as one of our senses, to minimize the use of our hands to do things except poke at a screen.”

They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth.21 He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect in the world. But craftsmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.

One way to understand the exploding popularity of social media platforms in recent years is that they offer a substitute source of aggrandizement.

these digital cries for attention are often a poor substitute for the recognition generated by handicraft, as they’re not backed by the hard-won skill required to tame the “infallible judgment” of physical reality, and come across instead as “the boasts of a boy.”

If you want to fully extract the benefits of this craft in your free time, in other words, seek it in its analog forms, and while doing so, fully embrace Rogowski’s closing advice: “Leave good evidence of yourself.22 Do good work.”

Leisure Lesson #2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.

Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.

many technological innovations of the past decade. I’m pointing this out to push back on the idea that high-quality leisure requires a nostalgic turning back of time to a pre-internet era. On the contrary, the internet is fueling a leisure renaissance of sorts by providing the average person more leisure options than ever before in human history.

PRACTICE: FIX OR BUILD SOMETHING EVERY WEEK