Digital Minimalism

Cal Newport

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.


What I like

  • The book will validate any concerns you might have over social media use and does so really well. It addresses topics like solitude, which felt unique to this book.

  • It’s easy to read both from a writing and typography perspective, I think anyone of any age can read it.

  • The book strikes a nice balance between real stories and empirical evidence to support arguments.

What’s missing

  • It doesn’t have many actionable steps for making social media better, or designing more ethical systems, only advice to improve your personal life which feels narrow.

  • Some chapters are ridiculously long compared to others, upwards of 40-50 pages. Ideas in this book could have been broken down more.

  • At points arguments become redundant or glaringly obvious, such as the concept of removing social media from your smartphone to reduce social media use.


Review

Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport is a book that I’ve been looking for for a long time. I was drawn to it by the concept of focus but I found a lot more in it. The book pulls the curtain back on the negatives and positives of social media usage (akin to Netflix documentary A Social Dilemma), and to no surprise it is pretty clear that the more connected social media makes us, the more we use it, and the more negatives there are for our personal lives. The chief argument in this book is that technology should be used to much to the point that it helps us achieve our values- anything more than that is unnecessary and might have negative effects- hence, digital minimalism. We do as much with technology as necessary to help us meet our goals which as a designer I find great.

There are a few topics I loved in this book that I think you will too. The first is the topic of solitude. It is a concept I had never been introduced to before and is all about giving yourself time to be with your thoughts, sort of like meditation. There are a lot of benefits to solitude, and it is a good excuse to put away our phones for a bit. The next concept that struck me was the argument between conversation and connection- two similar concepts with an important difference. It’s more fulfilling to have deep person/person conversation in our life than a pool of surface-level connections. A third topic I really enjoyed was the idea that we are in fact social animals wired for connection, and Newport makes a great case for this argument as you’ll find in this book. The value and impact of these three concepts makes this book worth picking up in my opinion.

I bought this book because of a memory I have from when I was a kid (~16 y.o) on a trip to Canada with my best friend. His family had a shack on a small island on Sturgeon Bay that we could boat too. Within boating range was a larger island that had a building with computers in it, which were connected to Facebook. It bums me out that my buddy and I would boat to the larger island just so that we could get to those computers and look for notifications, we were in after all a beautiful place and had eachother- what more could we need? I was so motivated to see that little red icon on our facebook pages that indicated connection. The feeling I got from that notification I won’t forget- that little red notification could mean anything. In hindsight it was ridiculous that we did this act nearly every day, but it’s indicative to me that these systems are extremely influential on behavior, because they capitalize on our core human desire to feel connected, and take advantage of the psychological principal of variable reward. The combination of both causes some interesting behaviors.

Do I think social networking is a bad thing? Not really. I think digital platforms connecting humans has its benefits, but there are second-order effects that outweigh them. I don’t use social media much outside of LinkedIN and YouTube though, because I frankly have better use for my time. I get my social kicks through my close group of friends that I hold near and dear, and make an effort for conversation by reaching out to folks. I think social media has the power to bring people together to do great things, but I don’t think that’s how the vast majority of people use it. I think people use it to feel rewarded by a synthetic form of connection. That feeling of reward creates a feedback loop, giving us the false impression that our social lives are incredibly deep, when in fact they are very shallow. But hey, as a millennial social media is one of our inventions so I feel obligated to help make it better. I can only hope the big businesses make an effort to fix the mistakes it has caused, and that users get their heads out of their asses and start taking responsibility for their attention and happiness. Call me an idealist.


Learnings

  • Modern social media in particular is designed like a slot machine in that I provides variable reward, which is one key driver of behavioral addiction.

  • Practicing digital minimalism not only means less is more, but it also means practicing three things with our use of technology: reduce clutter, be intentional, and optimize your uses

  • One way to become more minimal is to try a month without things, and then set rules for how you can access them.

  • Solitude is “a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other kinds”, it’s a practice that is mostly unpracticed these days in our culture of constant distraction in our pockets.

  • The default neural system is our brain activity when we are not focusing on a task, or we are bored, and it is primarily concerned with social thinking.

  • Social media provides connection, which is useless compared to conversation- which is a much more valuable effort at the cost of time.

  • In order to live a life of high quality leisure, we should plan for activities that are active (vs. passive), provide a tangible outcome in the physical world, and are social.

  • The attention economy is the idea that a company can curate a list of customers, and instead of selling stuff to them, they can sell their attention to another company.

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