Digital Minimalism
Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
Cal Newport is one of my favorite thinkers. He got his Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT and is now a Professor at Georgetown. He’s also a bestselling author of a number of books. Given the fact that the fastest way to Optimize your life is to STOP doing things that are sub-optimal AND the fact that (for nearly all of us) our use of technology is the #1 thing that “Needs work!,” it’s SUPER important for us to figure out how to best use all the technology available to us WITHOUT becoming lost in a tsunami of inputs. Enter: Our new philosophy of technology use: Digital Minimalism. Enter: My SUPER strong recommendation of the book and my ALL IN commitment to helping create a movement around the ideas in the book. As you know, I rarely say a book is a must read but this book is as close as it gets. Big Ideas we explore include the fact that your soul is engaged in a lopsided arms race, a definition + overview of digital minimalism, the importance of spending time alone (and the consequences of *not* spending adequate time alone), reclaiming leisure (get active!) and joining the Attention Resistance. Here's to Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World!
Big Ideas
- Your soul in a Lopsided arms raceIs fighting in a lopsided arms race.
- Digital MinimalismOur new philiosophy of tech use.
- Spend time alonePractice 1: Solitude. (No inputs!)
- Reclaim LeisurePractice 3: Get active!
- Join the Attention resistance movementPractice 4: Join the movement!
“Our current relationship with the technologies of our hyper-connected world is unsustainable and is leading us closer to the quiet desperation that Thoreau observed so many years ago. But as Thoreau reminds us, ‘the sun rose clear’ and we still have the ability to change this state of affairs.
To do so, however, we cannot passively allow the wild tangle of tools, entertainments, and distractions provided by the internet age to dictate how we spend our time or how we feel. We must indeed take steps to extract the good from these technologies while sidestepping what’s bad. We require a philosophy that puts our aspirations and values once again in charge of our daily experience, all the while dethroning primal whims and the business models of Silicon Valley from their current dominance of this role; a philosophy that accepts new technologies, but not if the price is the dehumanization Andrew Sullivan warned us about; a philosophy that prioritizes long-term meaning over short-term satisfaction.
A philosophy, in other words, like digital minimalism.”
~ Cal Newport from Digital Minimalism
Welcome to our fourth Note on one of Cal Newport’s brilliant books.
As we’ve discussed in the other Notes, Cal is one of my favorite thinkers. He got his Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT and is now a Professor at Georgetown.
He’s also a bestselling author of a number of books. I think we started our collection of Notes with So Good They Can’t Ignore You then moved on to Deep Work then went back to one of his earlier books How to Become a Straight-A Student and now here we are.
Since interviewing Cal about those books a few years ago, we’ve spent a fair amount of time chatting about Optimizing and a life well lived. In fact, he was basically the only human with whom I regularly scheduled chats during my hermit phase. (lol.)
I LOVE the way he sees the world and how his brain works. So when he told me about his ideas around “digital minimalism” I immediately got very excited to see what he’d come up with.
In fact, I got so excited to help him spread these ideas as far and wide as possible that this book became one of the catalysts for me to expand Heroic beyond just me and my work.
Enter: Digital Minimalism 101
<- Our first “101 with Friends” in which Cal walks us through 10 Big Ideas from this book to help us APPLY his philosophy on how to extract the best from technology while letting go of the rest.
As you can imagine, I HIGHLY recommend the book.
Given the fact that the fastest way to Optimize your life is to STOP doing things that are sub-optimal AND the fact that (for nearly all of us) our use of technology is the #1 thing that “Needs work!,” it’s SUPER important for us to figure out how to best use all the technology available to us WITHOUT becoming lost in a tsunami of inputs.
Enter: Our new philosophy of technology use: Digital Minimalism.
Enter: My SUPER strong recommendation of the book and my ALL IN commitment to helping create a movement around the ideas in the book. As you know, I rarely say a book is a must read but this book is as close as it gets. Get a copy (today!) here.
With that, I’m excited to share some of my favorite Big Ideas we can apply to our lives TODAY so let’s jump straight in!
Download MP3
Download PDFMuch in the same way that the ‘innovation’ of highly processed foods in the mid-twentieth century led to a global health crisis, the unintended side effects of digital communication tools—a sort of social fast food—are proving to be similarly worrisome.
Get the BookYour soul in a Lopsided arms race
“The fact that our humanity was routed by these tools over the past decade should come as no surprise. As I just detailed, we’ve been engaging in a lopsided arms race in which the technologies encroaching on our autonomy were preying with increasing precision on deep-seated vulnerabilities in our brains, while we still naively believed that we were just fiddling with fun gifts handed down from the nerd gods.
When Bill Maher joked that the App Store was coming for our souls, he was actually onto something. As Socrates explained to Phaedrus in Plato’s famous chariot metaphor, our soul can be understood as a chariot driver struggling to rein two horses, one representing our better nature and the other our baser impulses. 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.
When seen from this perspective, it becomes clear that this is a battle we must fight. But to do so, we need a more serious strategy, something custom built to swat aside the forces manipulating us toward behavioral addictions and that offers a concrete plan about how to put new technologies to use for our best aspirations not against them. Digital minimalism is one such strategy. It’s toward its details that we now turn our attention.”
Welcome to chapter #1: A Lopsided Arms Race.
We’ll start with that Bill Maher joke that the App Store wants your soul. The longer version of the joke includes him saying that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are like tobacco farmers in t-shirts—only they don’t just want our lungs they want our souls.
Maher made that joke after watching this 60 Minutes segment on “Brain Hacking.” ← If you haven’t watched that yet, please do yourself and your family a favor and watch it. It’s a fantastic complement to Cal’s analysis of just how much tech companies prey on our brain’s vulnerabilities to create addictive behaviors.
Having said that, Cal is very clear that he isn’t anti tech. He is pro flourishing. “How to put new technologies to use for our best aspirations not against them.”
Which brings us back to our souls.
Helping that chariot driver do his job well is, of course, the ultimate theme of all of our work together. And we’ve GOTTA KNOW that we’re in a battle when it comes to our technology use. And… We’ve gotta know that it’s “a lopsided arms race.”
For every screen you look at, there are a LOT of engineers thinking about how to get you to spend more time looking at it. Which would be *awesome* if their primary interest was helping you flourish and high five your inner daimon. But… It’s not—which is why we need to step back from a mindless consumption of “useful” technology and reclaim our autonomy.
As we do so, we’d be wise to keep that image of our charioteer soul in mind. And (echo!!) know that we’re in a battle featuring a “lopsided arms race.”
In Bored and Brilliant we quoted leading tech ethicist Tristan Harris (who is featured in that 60 Minutes episode). Here’s how he puts it “The most important thing to acknowledge is that it’s an unfair fight. On one side is a human being who’s just trying to get on with her prefrontal cortex, which is a million years old and in charge of regulating attention. That’s up against a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen, whose daily job is to break that and keep you scrolling on the infinite feed.”
btw: In another one of Socrates dialogues that Plato captures in The Giorgas, he tells us: “I desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can… And, to the utmost of my power, I exhort all other men to do the same… I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict.”
The ultimate weapon for the tech combat? Digital Minimalism.
A natural conclusion of this reality is that we should treat with great care any new technology that threatens to disrupt the ways in which we connect and communicate with others. When you mess with something so central to the success of our species, it’s easy to create problems.
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.
Digital Minimalism
“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.
The so-called digital minimalists who follow this philosophy constantly perform implicit cost-benefit analyses. If a new technology offers little more than a minor diversion or trivial convenience, the minimalist will ignore it. Even when a new technology promises to support something the minimalist values, it must still pass a stricter test: 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.
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.”
After the sobering exploration from chapter 1 on WHY we need a “philosophy of technology use,” we proceed to chapter 2 in which we’re officially introduced to that practical philosophy that will guide our tech behaviors: Digital Minimalism.
First, the recap: “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.” <- Brilliant.
Now, for the most obvious distinction we need to make here.
By default, most people (are you one of them?) adopt a digital MAXIMALIST approach to their tech use. The basic idea: If it’s available in the App Store and it does something useful and all the cool kids are using it, then OF COURSE I’m going to use it. Who wouldn’t? (Hah.)
Well… A MINIMALIST wouldn’t follow that line of thinking (and behaving).
Instead, we step back, remember that it’s no measure of well-being to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society (thanks, Krishnamurti!) and decide that we’re not going to go nuts on all the latest and greatest apps and gadgets.
We’re going to take a glance at our SOULS and ask him or her what THEY think about things.
We’re going to start with our VALUES and go from there.
What’s important to us? What do we want to achieve in life? (As in: What’s REALLY (!!!) soul-achingly important to us in this one precious life of ours?!)
THEN… We ask ourselves how to best use technology to achieve those goals.
Obviously, check out the book (and the class!) for more on how to go about engaging in the Digital Minimalism philosophy (which includes a brilliant 30-day digital declutter). For now, quick q: What would change in your life if you approached things with THAT orientation?
It’s a mistake to think of the digital declutter as only a detox experience. The goal is not to simply give yourself a break from technology, but to instead spark a permanent transformation of your digital life. The detoxing is merely a step that supports this transformation.
Spend time alone
“Returning to our canary-in-the-coal-mine analogy, the plight of iGen provides a strong warning about the danger of solitude deprivation. When an entire cohort unintentionally eliminated time alone with their thoughts from their lives, their mental health suffered dramatically. On reflection, this makes sense. These teenagers have lost the ability to process and make sense of their emotions, or to reflect on who they are and what really matters, or to build strong relationships, or even to just allow their brains time to power down their critical social circuits, which are not meant to be used constantly, and to redirect that energy to other important cognitive housekeeping tasks. We shouldn’t be surprised that these absences lead to malfunctions.
Most adults stop short of the constant connectivity practiced by members of iGen, but if you extrapolate these effects to the somewhat milder forms of solitude deprivation that have become common among many different age groups, the results are still worrisome. As I’ve learned by interacting with my readers, many have come to accept a background hum of low-grade anxiety that permeates their daily lives. When looking for explanations, they might turn to the latest crises—be it the recession of 2009 or the contentious election of 2016—or chalk it up to a normal reaction to the stresses of adulthood. But once you begin studying the positive benefits of spending time alone with your thoughts, and encounter the distressing effects that appear in populations that eliminate this altogether, a simple explanation emerges: we need solitude to thrive as human beings, and in recent years, without even realizing it, we’ve been systematically reducing this crucial ingredient from our lives.
Simply put, humans are not wired to be constantly wired.”
That’s from a chapter called Spend Time Alone in which we learn about the pernicious effects of NOT spending any time alone. (It’s the first of four practices in Part 2 of the book. The other three? “Don’t Click ‘Like’ + Reclaim Leisure + Join the Attention Resistance.”)
Want a SUPER-sobering glance at what happens when a whole generation is raised constantly connected to their technology? Look at iGen. And look closely at their rates of depression and anxiety (and suicide). (Gah.)
Then look at what science says about the positive benefits of spending time alone. Then, perhaps, look in the mirror and check in on whether YOU are experiencing a sort of “low-grade anxiety” that you might be misattributing to things outside of your incessant tech use. Then, if you feel so inspired, SPEND MORE TIME ALONE!!!
Cal kicks off this chapter discussing wisdom from Lead Yourself First by Raymond Kethledge and Michael Erwin. He shares their definition of solitude as “a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.”
Super simple. Super powerful. Super easy to take for granted.
Cal then shares his own definition of “Solitude Deprivation: A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your thoughts and free from input from other minds.”
Super simple. Super powerful. Super easy to take for granted.
Again, check out the book/class for more. For now, I HIGHLY encourage you to a) value the time in which you have ZERO inputs from other minds + b) start reclaiming those pockets of solitude.
btw: Here are a couple of my key practices: First, I NEVER have anything on when I’m driving. It’s pure quiet. No news. No music. No inputs. Just me and my thoughts. And, I NEVER have any inputs when I’m on the Trail training. No podcasts. No music. No inputs. Pure quiet. Just me and my thoughts. (Frankly, one of the things that kinda saddens me the most is seeing people on the Trail LOOKING DOWN AT THEIR PHONES while they hike! Really?)
btw2: Fun facts: I sent Cal a copy of Lead Yourself First so it was fun to see it featured in the book. And… Our second 101 with Friends? Mike Erwin will be teaching Lead Yourself First 101.
Erecting barriers against the existential is not new—before YouTube we had (and still have) mindless television and heavy drinking to help avoid deeper questions—but the advanced technologies of the twenty-first century attention economy are particularly effective at this task.
Earlier, I cited extensive research that supports the claim that 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 [of clicking ‘Like’]is the ultimate insult to our social processing machinery. To say it’s like driving a Ferrari under the speed limit is an understatement; the better simile is towing a Ferrari behind a mule.
Reclaim Leisure
“The state I’m helping you escape is one in which passive interaction with your screens is your primary leisure. I want you to replace this with a state where your leisure time is now filled with better pursuits, many of which will exist primarily in the physical world. In this new state, 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 themselves. Spending an hour browsing funny YouTube clips might sap your vitality, while—and I’m speaking from recent experience here—using YouTube to teach yourself how to replace a motor in a bathroom ventilation fan can provide the foundation for a satisfying afternoon of tinkering.
A foundational theme in digital minimalism is that new technology, when used with care and intention, creates a better life than either Luddism or mindless adoption.”
Reclaim Leisure. ← That’s the third practice of Digital Minimalism. Cal walks us through Aristotle’s argument in his Ethics that“high-quality leisure is essential to a life well-lived.” (He also talks about How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. ← See those Notes.)
All that PASSIVE leisure? The endless social media and news surfing and TV show watching? That’s not what we’re talking about here.
We want ACTIVE leisure. The kind that challenges you. And maybe even gets you up and out and connected with other people and/or challenging activities that require your soul to be present.
We THINK that sitting back and doing nothing will make us happy. But, that’s just not quite how it works. Csikszentmihalyi reflects on a similar theme in Flow. “Thus we have a paradoxical situation: On the job people feel skillful and challenged, and therefore feel more happy, strong, creative, and satisfied. In their free time people feel that there is generally not much to do and their skills are not being used, and therefore they tend to feel more sad, weak, dull, and dissatisfied. Yet they would like to work less and spend more time in [passive!] leisure.”
In sum: The Digital Minimalist uses technology wisely to help us engage in more meaningful forms of active leisure. While NOT squandering time with the passive stuff.
Q: How can you Optimize that a little more today?!
Declaring freedom from your smartphone is probably the most serious step you can take toward embracing the attention resistance. This follows because smartphones are the preferred Trojan horse of the digital attention economy.
Join the Attention resistance movement
“The lopsidedness of this battle is a big part of the reason I never messed around with any of these services in the first place. To repeat a line from the New Yorker writer George Packer, ‘[Twitter] scares me, not because I’m morally superior to it, but because I don’t think I could handle it. I’m afraid I’d end up letting my own son go hungry.’ If you must use these services, however, and you hope to do so without ceding autonomy over your time and attention, it’s crucial to understand that this is not a casual decision. You’re instead waging a David and Goliath battle against institutions that are both impossibly rich and intent on using this wealth to stop you from winning.
Put another way, to approach attention economy services with the intentionality proposed by Ginsberg and Burke is not a commonsense adjustment to your digital habits, but is instead better understood as a bold act of resistance. Fortunately, if you take this path, you’ll not be alone. My research on digital minimalism has revealed the existence of a loosely organized attention resistance movement, made up of individuals who combine high-tech tools with disciplined operating procedures to conduct surgical strikes on popular attention economy services—dropping in to extract value, and then slipping away before the attention traps set by these companies can spring shut.”
That’s from a chapter on the fourth practice: Join the Attention Resistance. Let’s step back for a moment and talk about the attention economy. As we discussed in Conquering Digital Addiction 101, it’s huge. As in TRILLIONS and TRILLIONS of dollars huge.
Here’s what we need to know. When you’re using a site like Facebook (or Instagram or Twitter or any other “free” service like that), you THINK that the product is the site or app you’re using. But, news flash: YOU are the product. Those companies are using YOU (and, more specifically, your attention) as a product they sell to their real customers—the advertisers who pay for a share of your attention. Which is why it’s called the “attention economy.”
And THAT is why they’re spending so much money and energy trying to figure out how to capture your attention. And that is why it’s such a lopsided arms race and why we need to be so vigilant in deliberately choosing how we use all that technology.
Enter: The Attention Resistance. A movement of people (like us!) who are engaged in one of the great (and most important!) battles of modern life—preserving our soul’s most valuable asset.
Ultimately: “the key to sustained success with digital minimalism is accepting that it’s not really about technology, but is instead more about the quality of your life. The more you experiment with the ideas and practices on the preceding pages, the more you’ll come to realize that digital minimalism is much more than a set of rules, it’s about cultivating a life worth living in our current state of alluring devices.”
Vive la résistance!
Digital minimalism definitively does not reject innovations of the internet age, but instead rejects the way so many people currently engage in those tools.
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