Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport - Full Notes
(x) Digital exhaustion
Overall impact of having so many different shining baubles pulling so insistently at their attention and manipulating their mood [like baubles in a baby's crib]
(8) Uncomfortable feeling of losing control
Ex: lose our ability to enjoy a nice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience
(18-19) Web surfing also has unpredictable reinforcement:
Most articles are duds, but occasionally one creates strong emotion (righteous anger or laughter)
Every appealing headline clicked or intriguing link tabbed is another metaphorical pull of the slot machine handle
(22) Universal urge to immediately answer an incoming text
Paleolithic brain categorizes ignoring a newly arrived text the same as snubbing the tribe member trying to attract your attention to the communal fire: a potentially dangerous social faux pas
(28) 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
"Work backward from your deep values to your technology choices"
Contrasts starkly with the maximalist philosophy that most people deploy by default
(30) 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
Tyler, minimalist: started volunteering, exercises regularly, reading 3-4 books/month, learning to play the ukulele (!!)
(35) Principles of digital minimalism
Clutter is costly
Optimization is important
Intentionality is satisfying
(39) Thoreau: "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"
(43) Thoreau forces us to confront the trade-offs inherent in digital clutter more precisely
He asks us to treat the minutes of our life as a concrete and valuable substance
(46) Most people invest very little energy into digital optimizations
Most people's personal technology processes currently exist on the early part of the return curve
Additional attempts to optimize will yield massive improvements
Important to focus on how you use technologies (ex: never stream shows alone)
(56) Laura (doesn't use a smartphone) feels "smug" at times
Her "smugness" is actually the sense of meaning that comes from acting with intention
Acting with intention = fundamental to human flourishing
"The very act of being selective about your tools will bring you satisfaction"
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
(60) 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
(74) You must "aggressively explore higher-quality activities to fill the time left vacant by the optional technologies you're avoiding"
At the end of the break, reintroduce optional technologies into your life, starting from a blank slate
For each tech you reintroduce, determine what value it serves in your life, and how specifically you will use it so as to maximize this value
(98) Three benefits of solitude:
New ideas, an understanding of the self, closeness to others
"The ability to be alone…is anything but a rejection of close bonds" and can instead affirm them
Calmly experiencing separation builds your appreciate for interpersonal connections when they do occur
Mart Sarton: "I taste life fully only when I am alone"
Wendell Berry: "We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness"
[Write letter to Ben Sasse based on this page]
(101) The smartphone eliminated remaining slivers of solitude with the "quick glance"
At the slightest hint of boredom, you glance at content that's been optimized to give you immediate/satisfying dose of input from other minds
"It's now possible to completely banish solitude from your life"
Worth wondering if people might forget this state of being all together
Waning solitude discussion is complicated because it's easy to underestimate the severity of this phenomenon
Most don't realize the full magnitude of technology's impact
Prioritization of communication over reflection is a serious concern
(104) When you miss out on solitude, you miss out on the positive things it brings you
The ability to clarify hard problems, regulate your emotions, build moral courage, and strengthen relationships
Teenagers consume media 9 hrs/day, on average
(108) Teens have lost ability to:
Process/make sense of their emotions
Reflect on who they are and what really matters
Build strong relationships
Allow their brains time to power down their critical social circuits (not meant to be used constantly)
(111) Glenn Gould (pianist): for every hour you spend with other human beings you need X number of hours alone….it's a substantial ration
(114) Most improvement from smartphones is minor
In 90 percent of your daily life, the presence of a cell phone either doesn't matter or makes things only slightly more convenient
They're useful, but it's hyperbolic to believe its ubiquitous presence is vital
The urgency we feel to always have a phone with us is exaggerated
Cal: "I recommend that you try to spend some time away from your phone most days"
(119) Walking is a fantastic source of solitude
Nietzsche: "We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books" (also: TV, internet)
The "grist of productive aloneness"
(120) Walks serve multiple purposes:
Trying to make progress on a professional problem
Self-reflection on some particular aspect of your life that you think needs more attention
Gratitude walks
Your focus on walks will often shift - defer to your cognitive inclinations, to what really needs attention
Remind yourself how hard it would be to pick up these signals amid the noise that dominates in the absence of solitude
These efforts are hard, but the rewards are big
Cal: "I'm quite simply happier and more productive -- by noticeably large factors -- when I'm walking regularly"
Many others, both today and historically, enjoy this substantial injection of solitude into an otherwise hectic life
Walking "reserves our health and spirits"
(123) Cal writes letters to himself in moleskin notebooks
On the first page he always transcribes his current list of values ("The Plan")
Not exactly diaries - he writes irregularly
"They provide…a way to write a letter to myself when encountering a complicated decision, or hard emotion, or surge of inspiration"
"By the time I'm done composing my thoughts in the structured form demanded by written prose, I've often gained clarity"
"Act of writing itself that already yields the bulk of the benefits"
Writing a letter to yourself is an excellent mechanism for generating pure, uninfluenced solitude
Not only frees you from outside inputs, but also provides a conceptual scaffolding on which to sort and organize your thinking
Eisenhower, Lincoln also had similar practices
(132-133) Our brains are hardly ever thinking about nothing
Highly active background hum: tends to focus on a small number of targets
Thoughts about "other people, yourself, or both"
Our brain defaults to thinking about our social life
Lieberman (researcher) now believes "we are interested in the social world because we are built to turn on the default network during our free time"
Our brains adapted to automatically practice social thinking during any moments of cognitive downtime
This practice helps us become really interested in our social world
(135) Simple, 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
Mentalizing: helping us understand other people's minds, including how they are feeling and their intentions
It's an amazingly complicated feat performed by networks honed over millions of years of evolution
Humans are wired to be social
(136) Digital communication tools have pushed people's social networks much larger and less local
We communicate digitally with messages and clicks that are orders of magnitude less information-laden than what we've evolved to expect
Clash of old neural systems with modern innovations has caused problems
Digital communication tools = social fast food ---> unintended side effects
Similar to how "innovation" of highly processed food ---> global health crisis
(141) Problem isn't that using social media directly makes us unhappy
Key issue = using social media tends to take people away from the real-world socializing that's massively more valuable
More time using social media = less time devoted to offline interaction
(142) Why I hate texting so much:
"The low-bandwidth chatter supported by digital communication tools might offer a simulacrum of connection, but it leaves most of our high-performance social processing networks underused - reducing these tools' ability to satisfy our intense sociality
Value generated by FB comment/Insta like -- although real -- is minor compared to value generated by analogy conversation/shared real-world activity
Why we always check texts immediately:
Our analog brain cannot easily distinguish between importance of person in room with us vs. person who just sent us a new text
(145) "Face-to-face conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. We attend to tone and nuance."
(149) 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
As you trade more social media time for real conversation, the richness of these analog interactions will far outweigh what you're leaving behind
(153) [On clicking "Like"] To replace the rich flow of conversation with a single bit of information is the ultimate insult to our social processing machinery
It's like towing a Ferrari behind a mule
(154) You should never click "Like"
Hard stance b/c they teach our mind that connection is a reasonable alternative to conversation
Low-value interactions will inevitably expand until it pushes out high-value socializing that actually matters
Not clicking "Like"/commenting will "radically change for the better how you maintain your social life"
(155) Humans have maintained rich and fulfilling social lives for our entire history without needing the ability to send a few bits of information each month to people we knew briefly during high school
Academic who studies social media: "I don't think we're meant to keep in touch with so many people"
Being less available over text has a way of paradoxically strengthening your relationship
B/c you don't feel like you've satisfied your need for convo with only texting
(165-166) Aristotle: A life well lived requires activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity itself generates
Life filled with deep thinking is happy b/c contemplation is an activity that's appreciated for its own sake
(168) Low-quality digital distractions play a more important role in people's lives than they imagine
More and more people failing to cultivate high-quality leisure lives that Aristotle identifies as crucial for human happiness
Void would be unbearable, but it can be ignored w/help of digital noise
Fill gaps by numbing yourself with mindless swiping and tapping
(176) Working hard in your eight "off" hours will assuredly increase the value of the business eight
Mental faculties are capable of continuous hard activity; they don't time, they just want change
(177) Leisure lessons
Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption
Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world
Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions
(178) Our species evolved as beings that experience and manipulate the world around us
(182) On a social level, video games are decidedly low bandwidth compares to the experience of playing a game on a square of flat cardboard with another human being
(192) The internet is fueling a leisure renaissance of sorts by providing the average person more leisure options that ever before in human history (ex: via YouTube how-to vids)
Foundational theory of digital minimalism: new technology, when used with care and intention, creates a better life than either Luddism or mindless adoption
(200) Suggestion: schedule in advance the time you spend on low-quality leisure
(221) Intentionally approaching attention economy services is a bold act of resistance
(227-228) Against multitasking on a computer:
What makes general-purpose computing powerful is that you don't need separate devices for separate uses, not that it allows you to do multiple things at the same time
(237) Europeans focus on Slow Media (consume high-quality sources), while Americans tend to aim for low-information diet
Aggressively eliminating what's bad rather than celebrating what's good
Cal: I suspect the European focus on slowness is more likely to succeed in the long run
(238) Once the web-browsing ritual sequence is activated, it unfolds on autopilot
The slightest hint of boredom becomes a trip wire to activate this whole hulking Rube Goldberg apparatus
(251) Innovations driving electronic communication are mystifyingly different from what had gone before
We lack an intuition for flowing electricity and the complex components that control it (unlike a locomotive)
We've always struggled to imagine the consequences of the electronic communication revolution
(252) Result = society left reeling by unintended consequences
We quickly realized what Silicon Valley was selling was also degrading our humanity
(252) Digital minimalists see new technologies as tools to be used to support things they deeply value -- not as the sources of value themselves
Apply new technology in highly selective and intentional ways that yield big wins
Digital minimalism is about cultivating a life worth living in our current age of alluring devices
(253) Digital minimalism definitively does not reject the innovations of the internet age
Instead rejects the way so many people engage with these tools
(254) Goal = say with confidence: "Because of technology, I'm a better human being than I ever was before"