Digital Minimalism - Cal Newport Flashcards
Introduction
“I Used to Be a Human Being”
Digital minimalists are the calm, happy people who can hold long conversations without furtive glances at their phones.
They can have fun without the obsessive urge to document it.
They don’t experience ‘FOMO’ because they already know which activities provide them with meaning and satisfaction.
Social media has an ability to manipulate your mood.
In an open marketplace for attention, darker emotions attract more eyeballs than positive constructive thought.
Marcus Aurelius asked: “You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life”
Make intentional activities the core of your life.
Part 1 Foundations
A LOPSIDED ARMS RACE
The modern hyper-connected existence is one in which ‘a moment can feel strangely flat if it exists solely in itself’
Techno-apologists are quick to push back by turning the discussion to utility.
Why do we have a frantic urge to document everything for a virtual audience?
Bill Maher
“The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking.”
There is a whole playbook of techniques that get used (by technology companies) to get you using the product for as long as possible.
Minimising distraction and respecting users’ attention would reduce revenue. Compulsive use sells. The attention economy is a race to the bottom of the brain stem.
Technology serves advertising, not us, by hijacking our minds.
Addictive properties of new technologies are not accidents, but instead carefully engineered design features such as:
1/ Intermittent positive reinforcement
2/ The drive for social approval
Unpredictability releases more dopamine.
It’s hard to exaggerate how much the ‘like’ button changed the psychology of Facebook use.
Users gamble every time they post something on a social media platform.
Tech companies recognise the power of this unpredictable positive feedback hook.
We’re social beings who cannot ever completely ignore what other people think of us.
The power of the drive for social approval should not be underestimated. The tech industry has become adept at exploiting this vulnerability in human psychology.
A MINIMAL SOLUTION
The principles of digital minimalism
1/ Clutter is costly
2/ Optimisation is important
3/ Intentionality is satisfying
Walden: ‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately’.
A sense of meaning comes from action with intention.
Do not outsource your autonomy to an attention economy conglomerate.
THE DIGITAL DECLUTTER
For many people, their compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life.
Don’t get sucked down the rabbit-hole of un-productivity by checking your phone all the time.
Part 2 Practices
SPEND TIME ALONE
Solitude is about what’s happening in your brain, not the environment around you. It is a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.
Solitude is valuable due to the insight (new ideas + understanding of the self) and emotional balance (closeness to others) that comes from unhurried self-reflection.
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Blaise Pascal
Solitude is not a pleasant diversion, but instead a form of liberation from the cognitive oppression that results in its absence.
Many people have come to accept a background hum of low-grade anxiety that permeates their daily lives.
The urgency we feel to always have a phone with us is exaggerated.
DON’T CLICK LIKE
Aristotle: ‘Man is by nature a social animal’
There’s a particular set of regions in the brain that consistently activate when you’re not attempting to do a cognitive task, and that just as consistently deactivate once you focus your attention on something specific.
The default network seems to be connect to social cognition. In other words, when given downtime, our brain defaults to thinking about our social life. This behaviour is instinctual.
The finding underscores the fundamental importance of social connections to human well-being.
Our sociality is too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.
The idea that it’s valuable to maintain vast numbers of weak-tie social connections is largely an invention of the past decade.
RECLAIM LEISURE
Low quality digital distractions play a more important role in people’s lives than they imagine.
The void can be avoided with the help of digital noise, numbing yourself with mindless swiping and tapping.
Erecting barriers agains the existential is not new.
Expending more energy in your desire can end up energising you more.
Prioritise demanding activity over passive consumption.
One way to understand the exploding popularity of social media platforms in recent years is that they offer a substitute source of aggrandisement. Digital cries for attention are often a poor substitute for the recognition generated by high-quality leisure.
Seek activities that require real-world social interactions.
JOIN THE ATTENTION RESISTANCE
The ‘attention economy’ describes the business sector that makes money gathering consumers’ attention and then repackaging and selling it to advertisers.
Extracting eyeball minutes, the key resource for Facebook, has become significantly more lucrative than extracting oil.
Facebook has turned smartphones into ubiquitous billboards. They have innovated the field of attention engineering by exploiting psychological vulnerabilities to trick users into spending far more time on these services than they actually intended.
The digital attention economy is shovelling more clickbait toward us and fragmenting our focus into emotionally charged shards.
