"Virtuous hobbies": doing productive work. Contrast with consumption hobbies, like watching TV,
which produce no value.
He argues that passive leisure, like TV browsing, depletes energy, whereas physically and mentally
demanding leisure, like clearing a trail, is satisfying and energizing.
"Solitude deprivation: a state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts
and free from input from other minds."
The interaction mechanisms on social media are low-bandwidth: likes and views. The
high-performance social processing hardware in our brains is vastly underused.
High quality leisure is mostly analog: "Though there is some pride to be gained in learning a new
computer program, or figuring out a complicated new gadget, most of us already spend enough time
moving symbols around on screens. The leisure we're tackling here is meant to tap into our strong
instinct for manipulating objects in the physical world."
The "slow media movement": focus on the big ideas, not just current events.
Breaking news is always much lower quality than a summary report once journalists have had time
to process it. So wait for that.
Intro
People often say that digital life feels exhausting. The many persistent demands on one's
attention adds up to a large negative impact.
The challenge with phones and social media is that they bring large benefits, mixed with harm.
A lopsided arms race (chap 1)
"Increasingly, they [social media] dictate how we behave and how we feel, and somehow coerce us to
use them more than we think is healthy, often at the expense of other activities we find more
valuable. What's making us uncomfortable, in other words, is this feeling of losing control."
"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."
"The attention economy drives companies like Google into a 'race to the bottom of the brain
stem.'"
Intermittent positive reinforcement: dopamine release is stronger when the reward is intermittent.
Posting content will produce an unknown number of likes.
Social media was originally about posting information for others to be able to find; it wasn't
interactive or addictive. The like button added interaction and feedback.
(For me, I remember this intermittent reinforcement when I was blogging. I would check my posts
for new comments. In the early days building websites, I would frequently check the hit counters
on my websites to see how many visitors came. I craved for some form of feedback).
We strongly crave the approval of our tribe, which is what likes on posts delivers. And
conversely, getting no feedback causes distress.
Digital Minimalism (chap 2)
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."
Contrast to maximalism, where tech with any potential benefit is worth adopting.
"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."
(Well-put. To me, this sounds analogous in software engineering to the decision of how many
dependencies are worth pulling in.)
Principles
Clutter is costly
The cumulative cost of the little non-crucial things that we fill up our days with can
outweigh the benefits we're getting from doing them.
Optimization is important
"Most people's personal technology processes currently exist on the early part of the return
curve — the location where additional attempts to optimize will yield massive improvements."
(Not me. I have the opposite problem: I'm tempted to continue optimizing into the part of
the curve that has diminishing returns.)
Intentionality is satisfying
He reflects on Amish living, about how they are very intentional about evaluating new
technologies to see whether they undermine the Amish sense of community.
"The sugar high of convenience is fleeting and the sting of missing out dulls rapidly, but the
meaningful glow that comes from taking charge of what claims your time and attention is
something that persists."
The process of selecting — being intentional — conveys satisfaction.
Minimalism and its benefits are not new
"The past couple of decades are also defined by a resurgent narrative of techno-maximalism that
contends more is better when it comes to technology — more connections, more information, more
options."
(It seems to me this is also the case with nutrition culture: supplements, elaborate diets; a
call to adopt all of this stuff which, most probably, has minor benefits).
The Digital Declutter (chap 3)
An exercise for cutting out all optional digital tech usage, spending 30 days experiencing the
loss and searching for better ways to use your attention, and then afterwards, selectively
reintroducing the tech that was high value. Possibly with constraints.
"You want to arrive at the end of the declutter having rediscovered the type of activities that
generate real satisfaction, enabling you to confidently craft a better life — one in which
technology serves only a supporting role for more meaningful ends."
"Is this technology the best way to support this value? We justify many of the technologies that
tyrannize our time and attention with some tangential connection to something we care about. The
minimalist, by contrast, measures the value of these connections and is unimpressed by all but the
most robust."
Spend time alone (chap 4)
He reflects on Lincoln's use of a solitary country house during the first intense months of his
presidency, to afford himself essential time and space to think.
Definition of solitude: a state in which one's mind is free from the input of other minds, such
that one can grapple with one's own thoughts in isolation. It does not require physical
separation. Note that books deliver input from other minds, so reading is not solitude by this
definition.
"Storr's conclusion is that we're wrong to consider intimate interaction as the sine qua non of
human thriving. Solitude can be just as important for both happiness and productivity."
"I taste life fully only when I'm alone." - May Sarton.
"Regular doses of solitude, mixed in with our default mode of sociality, are necessary to flourish
as a human being."
"For the first time in human history solitude is starting to fade away altogether."
The iPod was used by the young generation in the 2000s to provide a musical backdrop to one's
entire day, and all idle moments, for the first time in history.
"The smartphone provided a new technique to banish these remaining slivers of solitude: the quick
glance."
"Solitude deprivation: a state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts
and free from input from other minds."
Technology like Facebook prioritizes communication over reflection.
"Simply put, humans are not wired to be constantly wired."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau once wrote: "I never do anything but when walking, the countryside is my
study."
Nietzsche had a prolific decade of writing while walking several hours every day.
Walking (alone) is a high-quality source of solitude. Cal Newport cherished his one mile walk to
MIT each day while a post-doc. Some walks can simply be gratitude walks: enjoy the scenery and
weather.
Journaling: doing this requires finding time in solitude, and it's a great use of such time: just
you and your thoughts of the moment.
It's particularly valuable when you find yourself facing demanding or uncertain circumstances.
Don't click "like" (chap 5)
"Something as simple as a casual conversation with a store clerk requires massive amounts of
neuronal computational power to take in and process a high-bandwidth stream of clues about what's
going on in the clerk's mind."
We have the ability to "mindread" other complex animals. Our brains have tremendous hardware
dedicated to social processing.
"Certain social media activities, when isolated in an experiment, modestly boost well-being. The
key issue is that using social media tends to take people away from the real-world socializing
that's massively more valuable."
The interaction mechanisms on social media are low-bandwidth: likes and views. The
high-performance social processing hardware in our brains is vastly underused.
"The human brain has evolved to process the flood of information generated by face-to-face
interactions. To replace this rich flow with a single bit [(clicking a like button)] is the
ultimate insult to our social processing machinery."
He hypothesizes why people adopt social media despite the shallowness:
"Humans are naturally biased toward activities that require less energy in the short term, even
if it's more harmful in the long term — so we end up texting our sibling instead of calling
them on the phone."
Face time is miraculous. "This philosophy has nothing against technology — so long as the tools
are put to use to improve your real-world social life as opposed to diminishing it."
Consolidate texting
Make it async and do it in batches, like email. This prevents it from interrupting you, and from
displacing real, high-bandwidth conversation.
"The more you text, however, the less necessary you'll deem real conversation, and, perversely,
when you do interact face-to-face, your compulsion to keep checking on other interactions on
your phone will diminish the value you experience."
Redirect conversations happening digitally to happen in real life. Call people during your
commute, have friends join you for walks or drinks at the pub.
Reclaim leisure (chap 6)
He argues that people who take a break from technology become uneasy without quick access to a
glut of distractions. This is because they have let shallow tech use displace their use of
high-quality leisure, and without it, they don't know what to do with their time.
"I seem to get satisfaction only from making stuff. Or maybe a better description would be solving
problems and making improvements." - Pete Adeney
(A blogger's framing of leisure; nice).
"Virtuous hobbies": doing productive work. Contrast them with consumption hobbies, like watching
TV, which produce no value.
"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." Arnold Bennett, How to Survive on 24 Hours a Day.
Spending more energy in your leisure can end up energizing you more.
"The value you receive from a pursuit is often proportional to the energy invested."
He argues that passive leisure, like TV browsing, depletes energy, whereas physically and mentally
demanding leisure, like clearing a trail, is satisfying and energizing.
So: prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.
"Craft doesn't necessarily require that you create a new object, it can also apply to high-value
behaviors." E.g. playing a song on the guitar, playing an excellent game of basketball.
(I'd never thought of basketball as being similar to building, or software development. But it
is similar; it's a performance that's "made" in the world, like a song or dance performance).
"Craft allows an escape from this shallowness and provides instead a deeper source of pride."
We crave to establish our self-worth, and producing something physical with self-evident skill
does that. Social media posts do not.
He argues that analog leisure activities, in the physical world, are probably more enriching than
programming or competing at video games, because of the richness and open possibility in the
physical world.
"Playing [tabletop] games also provides permission for what we can call supercharged socializing
— interactions with higher intensity levels than are common in polite society."
"On a social level, video games are decidedly low bandwidth compared to the experience of playing
a game on a square of flat cardboard with another human being." - David Sax, Revenge of Analog.
(Nice description of how CrossFit has indexed heavily on doing workouts in small groups rather
than solo, for encouragement and camaraderie.)
Traits for successful social leisure activities:
It should be in person. Virtual encounters in online games loses the richness of real-world
encounters.
(I think if one wants to play PC games with friends… do it as a LAN party!)
"The activity provides some sort of structure for the social interaction, including rules you
have to follow, insider terminology or rituals, and often a shared goal."
So: seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.
He argues that high quality leisure is mostly analog, but technology can facilitate that leisure
by improving discovery and connectedness between people doing a hobby.
"Digital technology is still present, but now subordinated to a support role: helping you to set
up or maintain your leisure activities, but not acting as the primary source of leisure itself."
"Though there is some pride to be gained in learning a new computer program, or figuring out a
complicated new gadget, most of us already spend enough time moving symbols around on screens. The
leisure we're tackling here is meant to tap into our strong instinct for manipulating objects in
the physical world."
He recommends learning a new physical skill every week as a default method for high-quality
leisure.
Join things in your local community and with friends. Join first, and later adjust the other
logistics of your life to accommodate.
Join the attention resistance (chap 7)
"The 'attention economy' describes the business sector that makes money gathering consumers'
attention and then repackaging and selling it to advertisers."
By 2017, 88% of Facebook's ad revenue came from mobile.
"It emphasizes that the smartphone versions of these services are much more adept at hijacking
your attention than the versions accessed through a web browser on your laptop."
Recommendation: only use social media on the desktop, if at all. The mobile versions have more
potent attention traps.
Social media is a poor source for entertainment. The Stories feature is reality TV from your
friends — it's dubious quality. It's a poor forum to discuss issues because civility is low. News
is spammy, or ranked by outrage properties.
The "slow media movement": focus on the big ideas, not just current events.
Breaking news is always much lower quality than a summary report once journalists have had time
to process it. So wait for that.