Digital Minimalism — Book Review & Quotes
Review
I’ve seen a number of books this year that focus on automation, human displacement, inabilities to compete with machines. When our efficiency is irrelevant, what is left to inform what it means to be human? Thoughtfulness. Creativity. Mindfulness. These are the ideas that, at least for the foreseeable future, will determine much of our humanity. So it’s probably a good idea to start thinking about what you’re doing with your last proprietary resource — your attention.”
Many people have pointed to the concern that the greatest minds of our generation are focused on figuring out how to get people to click on an add. This will ultimately draw attention to the lowest common denominators: “In an open marketplace for attention, darker emotions attract more eyeballs than positive and constructive thoughts.”
Some people think about this and work to help others treat their attention as a resource, an asset, or a bank account — to be watchfully doled out to the causes and bidders they’re willing to support (or at least those where they feel comfortable looking past their atrocities.) In that regard, your mindfulness becomes valued as an unplowed field, to be leveraged, plowed, and planted for gain.
A different approach is to value your mindfulness as a fortress, something you build where you can retreat for a defense. You create that fortress over a course of active choices, solitude, and thoughtfulness.
“Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences — wherever you happen to be.”
This is more than just mediation, though that can certainly be an arrow in the quiver. This is a genuine question of whether or not we can become a person whether that is societal goodness, or economic value.
Goodness: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” Blaise Pascal famously wrote in the late seventeenth century.”
Value: You can’t, in other words, build a billion-dollar empire like Facebook if you’re wasting hours every day using a service like Facebook.”
“In her book, Sherry Turkle summarizes research that found just five days at a camp with no phones or internet was enough to induce major increases in the campers’ well-being and sense of connection. It won’t take many walks with a friend, or pleasantly meandering phone calls, before you begin to wonder why you previously felt it was so important to turn away from the person sitting right in front of you to leave a comment on your cousin’s friend’s Instagram feed.”
Most people who hear me talk about Digital Minimalism typically ask a variation of the same question: “Is that book digital?” What they’re joking about is how difficult it obviously is to divorce operating in the modern world while decrying digital tools. What they’re not acknowledging is the more important point: we should be more thoughtful about not only what we let into our minds, but we let impact our minds.
Credit to my brother Chad Harrison for the analogy of mindfulness as a fortress vs. an unplowed field
Some Highlighted Quotes From The Book
“No one, of course, signed up for this loss of control. They downloaded the apps and set up accounts for good reasons, only to discover, with grim irony, that these services were beginning to undermine the very values that made them appealing in the first place: they joined Facebook to stay in touch with friends across the country, and then ended up unable to maintain an uninterrupted conversation with the friend sitting across the table.”
“In an open marketplace for attention, darker emotions attract more eyeballs than positive and constructive thoughts.”
“This reality creates a jumbled emotional landscape where you can simultaneously cherish your ability to discover inspiring photos on Instagram while fretting about this app’s ability to invade the evening hours you used to spend talking with friends or reading.”
“I’ve become convinced that what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.”
“Because digital minimalists spend so much less time connected than their peers, it’s easy to think of their lifestyle as extreme, but the minimalists would argue that this perception is backward: what’s extreme is how much time everyone else spends staring at their screens. The key to thriving in our high-tech world, they’ve learned, is to spend much less time using technology.”
“In Walden, Thoreau famously writes: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Less often quoted, however, is the optimistic rejoinder that follows in his next paragraph: They honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices.”
“It’s widely accepted that new technologies such as social media and smartphones massively changed how we live in the twenty-first century. There are many ways to portray this change. I think the social critic Laurence Scott does so quite effectively when he describes the modern hyper-connected existence as one in which “a moment can feel strangely flat if it exists solely in itself.””
“Bill Maher ends every episode of his HBO show Real Time with a monologue. The topics are usually political. This was not the case, however, on May 12, 2017, when Maher looked into the camera and said: 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.”
“After a mind-opening experience at Burning Man, Harris, in a move straight out of a Cameron Crowe screenplay, wrote a 144-slide manifesto titled “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention.” Harris sent the manifesto to a small group of friends at Google. It soon spread to thousands in the company, including co-CEO Larry Page, who called Harris into a meeting to discuss the bold ideas. Page named Harris to the newly invented position of “product philosopher.” But then: Nothing much changed. In a 2016 profile in the Atlantic, Harris blamed the lack of changes to the “inertia” of the organization and a lack of clarity about what he was advocating. The primary source of friction, of course, is almost certainly more simple: Minimizing distraction and respecting users’ attention would reduce revenue.”
“So Harris quit, started a nonprofit called Time Well Spent with the mission of demanding technology that “serves us, not advertising,” and went public with his warnings about how far technology companies are going to try to “hijack” our minds.”
“Addiction is a condition in which a person engages in use of a substance or in a behavior for which the rewarding effects provide a compelling incentive to repeatedly pursue the behavior despite detrimental consequences.”
“In his 2017 book, Irresistible, which details his study of this topic, Alter explores the many different “ingredients” that make a given technology likely to hook our brain and cultivate unhealthy use.”
“How tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.”
“In perhaps the most telling admission of all, in the fall of 2017, Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, spoke candidly at an event about the attention engineering deployed by his former company: The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, . . . was all about: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.”
“We didn’t sign up for the digital lives we now lead. They were instead, to a large extent, crafted in boardrooms to serve the interests of a select group of technology investors.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Principle #1: Clutter is costly. Digital minimalists recognize that cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates an overall negative cost that can swamp the small benefits that each individual item provides in isolation. Principle #2: Optimization is important. Digital minimalists believe that deciding a particular technology supports something they value is only the first step. To truly extract its full potential benefit, it’s necessary to think carefully about how they’ll use the technology. Principle #3: Intentionality is satisfying. Digital minimalists derive significant satisfaction from their general commitment to being more intentional about how they engage with new technologies. This source of satisfaction is independent of the specific decisions they make and is one of the biggest reasons that minimalism tends to be immensely meaningful to its practitioners.”
“Thoreau moved into the cabin where he then lived for the next two years. In the book Walden, he wrote about this experience, famously describing his motivation as follows: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
“This magician’s trick of shifting the units of measure from money to time is the core novelty of what the philosopher Frédéric Gros calls Thoreau’s “new economics,” a theory that builds on the following axiom, which Thoreau establishes early in Walden: “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.”
“As Frédéric Gros argues: The striking thing with Thoreau is not the actual content of the argument. After all, sages in earliest Antiquity had already proclaimed their contempt for possessions. . . . What impresses is the form of the argument. For Thoreau’s obsession with calculation runs deep. . . . He says: keep calculating, keep weighing. What exactly do I gain, or lose?”
“To use the appropriate economic terminology, 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. It’s this reality that leads digital minimalists to embrace the second principle, and focus not just on what technologies they adopt, but also on how they use them.”
“The Amish, it turns out, do something that’s both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism: they start with the things they value most, then work backward to ask whether a given new technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values. As Kraybill elaborates, they confront the following questions: “Is this going to be helpful or is it going to be detrimental? Is it going to bolster our life together, as a community, or is it going to somehow tear it down?”
“Outsourcing your autonomy to an attention economy conglomerate — as you do when you mindlessly sign up for whatever new hot service emerges from the Silicon Valley venture capitalist class — is the opposite of freedom, and will likely degrade your individuality.”
“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.”
“The goal of this final step is to start from a blank slate and only let back into your life technology that passes your strict minimalist standards. It’s the care you take here that will determine whether this process sparks lasting change in your life.”
“To allow an optional technology back into your life at the end of the digital declutter, it must: Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough). Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it’s not, replace it with something better). Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it.”
“An electrical engineer named De, for example, was surprised to discover during his digital declutter how addicted he had become to checking news online, and how anxious it was making him — especially politically charged articles. “I dumped all news during [my declutter] and loved it,” he told me. “Ignorance is truly bliss sometimes.” When the declutter concluded, he recognized that a complete news blackout was not sustainable but also recognized that subscribing to dozens of email newsletters and compulsively checking breaking news sites was not the best way to satisfy his need to be informed. He now checks AllSides.com once a day — a news site that covers the top stories, but for each story it neutrally links to three articles: one from a source associated with the political left, one from the right, and one from the center. This format has a way of defusing the aura of emotional charge that permeates a lot of our current political coverage, allowing De to stay up to speed without the spike in anxiety.”
“Lincoln’s time alone with his thoughts played a crucial role in his ability to navigate a demanding wartime presidency. We can therefore say, with only mild hyperbole, that in a certain sense, solitude helped save the nation.”
“I hope to convince you that, regardless of how you decide to shape your digital ecosystem, you should follow Lincoln’s example and give your brain the regular doses of quiet it requires to support a monumental life.”
“a precise definition of solitude. Many people mistakenly associate this term with physical separation — requiring, perhaps, that you hike to a remote cabin miles from another human being. This flawed definition introduces a standard of isolation that can be impractical for most to satisfy on any sort of a regular basis. As Kethledge and Erwin explain, however, solitude is about what’s happening in your brain, not the environment around you. Accordingly, they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.”
“Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences — wherever you happen to be.”
“These forces culminated on January 27, 1956, the night after King was released from his first stint in jail, where he had been locked up as part of an organized campaign of police harassment. King returned home after his wife and young daughter had gone to sleep, and realized that the time had come for him to clarify what he was about. Sitting alone with his thoughts, holding a cup of coffee at his kitchen table, King prayed and reflected. He embraced the solitude needed to make sense of the demands placed upon him, and in this space he found the answer that would provide him the courage needed for what was ahead: And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth.” Biographer David Garrow later described this event as “the most important night of [King’s] life.”
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” Blaise Pascal famously wrote in the late seventeenth century.”
“Half a century later, and an ocean away, Benjamin Franklin took up the subject in his journal: “I have read abundance of fine things on the subject of solitude. . . . I acknowledge solitude an agreeable refreshment to a busy mind.”
“Harris is concerned that new technologies help create a culture that undermines time alone with your thoughts, noting that “it matters enormously when that resource is under attack.” His survey of the relevant literature then points to three crucial benefits provided by solitude: “new ideas; an understanding of the self; and closeness to others.”
“The poet and essayist May Sarton explored the strangeness of this point in a 1972 diary entry, writing: I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what is strange — that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone . . .”
“Even though iPods became ubiquitous, there were still moments in which it was either too much trouble to slip in the earbuds (think: waiting to be called into a meeting), or it might be socially awkward to do so (think: sitting bored during a slow hymn at a church service). The smartphone provided a new technique to banish these remaining slivers of solitude: the quick glance. At the slightest hint of boredom, you can now surreptitiously glance at any number of apps or mobile-adapted websites that have been optimized to provide you an immediate and satisfying dose of input from other minds.”
“Solitude Deprivation A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.”
“when you avoid solitude, you miss out on the positive things it brings you: the ability to clarify hard problems, to regulate your emotions, to build moral courage, and to strengthen relationships. If you suffer from chronic solitude deprivation, therefore, the quality of your life degrades.”
“I was chatting with the head of mental health services at a well-known university where I had been invited to speak. This administrator told me that she had begun seeing major shifts in student mental health. Until recently, the mental health center on campus had seen the same mix of teenage issues that have been common for decades: homesickness, eating disorders, some depression, and the occasional case of OCD. Then everything changed. Seemingly overnight the number of students seeking mental health counseling massively expanded, and the standard mix of teenage issues was dominated by something that used to be relatively rare: anxiety.”
“But once you begin studying the positive benefits of time alone with your thoughts, and encounter the distressing effects that appear in populations that eliminate this altogether, a simpler 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.”
“But as Maynard explains, this complicated mixture of solitude and companionship is not a secret Thoreau was trying to hide. It was, in some sense, the whole point. “[ Thoreau’s] intention was not to inhabit a wilderness,” he writes, “but to find wildness in a suburban setting.”
“Only thoughts reached by walking have value.” To underscore his esteem for walking, Nietzsche also notes: “The sedentary life is the very sin against the Holy Spirit.”
“Wendell Berry, another proponent of strolling, used long outings through the fields and forests of his rural Kentucky to clarify his pastoral values. As he once wrote: As I walk, I am always reminded of the slow, patient building of soil in the woods. And I am reminded of the events and companions of my life — for my walks, after so long, are cultural events.”
“Nietzsche emphasized this point when he contrasted the originality of his walk-stimulated ideas with those produced by the bookish scholar locked in a library reacting only to other people’s work. “We do not belong,” he wrote, “to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books.”
“I’ve long embraced this philosophy. When I was a postdoc at MIT, my wife and I rented a tiny apartment on Beacon Hill, about a mile’s walk across the Longfellow Bridge to the east side of campus where I worked. I made this walk every day, regardless of the weather. I would sometimes meet my wife after work on the banks of the Charles River. If I got there early, I would read. It was on these riverbanks that, appropriately enough, I first discovered the writings of Thoreau and Emerson. Living, as I now do, in Takoma Park, Maryland, a small town inside the Washington, DC, beltway, I can no longer make long daily walks by a river part of my commute. One of the features that attracted me to this town, however, is its extensive sidewalks shaded by a well-maintained tree canopy. I’m quickly gaining a reputation as that odd professor who seems to be constantly wandering up and down the Takoma Park streets.”
“Thoreau once wrote: I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least — and it is commonly more than that — sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. Most of us will never meet Thoreau’s ambitious commitment to ambulation. But if we remain inspired by his vision, and try to spend as much time as is reasonable on foot and engaging in the “noble art” of walking, we too will experience success in preserving our health and spirits.”
“When I recently reread these notebooks, I was surprised to recall how far my thinking had already developed on issues like the danger of passion in career planning, the power of specialized craftsmanship in an age of general-purpose computing, and, presciently, the appeal of a new brand of technology-focused minimalism — which I was calling “Simplicity 2.0” at the time.”
“These notebooks play a different role: they provide me a way to write a letter to myself when encountering a complicated decision, or a hard emotion, or a 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. I do make a habit of regularly reviewing these entries, but this habit is often superfluous. It’s the act of writing itself that already yields the bulk of the benefits.”
“A little self-reflection, however, makes clear that our brains are hardly ever actually thinking about nothing. Even without a specific task, they tend to remain highly active, with thoughts and ideas flitting by in an ongoing noisy chatter. On further self-reflection, Lieberman realized that this background hum of activity tends to focus on a small number of targets: thoughts about “other people, yourself, or both.” The default network, in other words, seems to be connected to social cognition.”
“Perhaps predictably, this clash of old neural systems with modern innovations has caused problems. Much 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.”
“After crunching the numbers, the researchers found that the more someone used social media, the more likely they were to be lonely. Indeed, someone in the highest quartile of social media use was three times more likely to be lonelier than someone in the lowest quartile. These results held up even after the researchers controlled for factors such as age, gender, relationship status, household income, and education. Primack admitted to NPR that he was surprised by the results: “It’s social media, so aren’t people supposed to be socially connected?” But the data was clear. The more time you spend “connecting” on these services, the more isolated you’re likely to become.”
“What we know at this point,” Shakya told NPR, “is that we have evidence that replacing your real-world relationships with social media use is detrimental to your well-being.”
“Turkle agrees with our premise that conversation is crucial: Face-to-face conversation is the most human — and humanizing — thing we do. Fully present to one another, we learn to listen. It’s where we develop the capacity for empathy. It’s where we experience the joy of being heard, of being understood.”
“Turkle offers a series of recommendations, which center in large part on the idea of making more space in your life for quality conversation. The objective of this recommendation is faultless, but its effectiveness is questionable. As argued earlier in this chapter, digital communication tools, if used without intention, have a way of forcing a trade-off between conversation and connection. If you don’t first reform your relationship with tools like social media and text messaging, attempts to shoehorn more conversation into your life are likely to fail.”
“When my sister was living in Japan, we would regularly converse over FaceTime, deciding to place a call based on the same spur-of-the-moment inspiration with which you might casually drop in on a relative living down the street. At any other period of human history, this capability would be considered miraculous. In short, 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.”
“In her book, Sherry Turkle summarizes research that found just five days at a camp with no phones or internet was enough to induce major increases in the campers’ well-being and sense of connection. It won’t take many walks with a friend, or pleasantly meandering phone calls, before you begin to wonder why you previously felt it was so important to turn away from the person sitting right in front of you to leave a comment on your cousin’s friend’s Instagram feed.”
“Finally, it’s worth noting that refusing to use social media icons and comments to interact means that some people will inevitably fall out of your social orbit — in particular, those whose relationship with you exists only over social media. Here’s my tough love reassurance: let them go. The idea that it’s valuable to maintain vast numbers of weak-tie social connections is largely an invention of the past decade or so — the detritus of overexuberant network scientists spilling inappropriately into the social sphere. 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. Nothing about your life will notably diminish when you return to this steady state. As an academic who studies and teaches social media explained to me: “I don’t think we’re meant to keep in touch with so many people.”
“Aristotle steps back from this gritted-teeth heroic virtue and makes a radical turn in his argument: “The best and most pleasant life is the life of the intellect.” He concludes, “This life will also be the happiest.” As Aristotle elaborates, a life filled with deep thinking is happy because contemplation is an “activity that is appreciated for its own sake . . . nothing is gained from it except the act of contemplation.” In this offhand claim, Aristotle is identifying, for perhaps the first time in the history of recorded philosophy, an idea that has persisted throughout the intervening millennia and continues to resonate with our understanding of human nature today: a life well lived requires activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity itself generates.”
“Harris felt uncomfortable, in other words, not because he was craving a particular digital habit, but because he didn’t know what to do with himself once his general access to the world of connected screens was removed.”
“The most successful digital minimalists, therefore, tend to start their conversion by renovating what they do with their free time — cultivating high-quality leisure before culling the worst of their digital habits. In fact, many minimalists will describe a phenomenon in which digital habits that they previously felt to be essential to their daily schedule suddenly seemed frivolous once they became more intentional about what they did with their time. When the void is filled, you no longer need distractions to help you avoid it.”
“Here’s how Pete explains his leisure philosophy on his blog: I never understood the joy of watching other people play sports, can’t stand tourist attractions, don’t sit on the beach unless there’s a really big sand castle that needs to be made, [and I] don’t care about what the celebrities and politicians are doing. . . . Instead of all this, I seem to get satisfaction only from making stuff. Or maybe a better description would be solving problems and making improvements.”
“Theodore Roosevelt famously said: “I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.” Roosevelt practiced what he preached. As president, Roosevelt regularly boxed (until a hard blow detached his left retina), practiced jujitsu, skinny-dipped in the Potomac, and read at the rate of one book per day. He was not one to sit back and relax.”
“What interests me instead is a more timeless piece of Bennett’s argument, in which he fights the claim that his prescription of strained effort is too demanding to qualify as leisure: What? You say that full energy given to those sixteen hours will lessen the value of the business eight? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business eight. 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.”
“Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.”
“Leisure Lesson #2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.”
“Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.”
“Handiness is rarer today for the simple reason that, for most people, it’s no longer essential for either their professional or home lives to function smoothly. This transition has pros and cons. The main pro, of course, is that it frees up massive numbers of hours to be put toward more productive use. There’s a thrill to fixing something that’s broken, but if you’re constantly fixing things, it can get old. Economists will also argue that specialization is more efficient. If you’re a lawyer, you’re better off, from a financial perspective, dedicating your time to becoming a better lawyer, and then trading some of the extra money you earn to people who specialize in fixing when something breaks. But maximizing personal and financial efficiency isn’t the only relevant goal. As I argued earlier in this chapter, learning and applying new skills is an important source of high-quality leisure. If you can achieve some degree of handiness, therefore, you can more easily tap into this type of satisfying activity. This practice won’t ask you to become Pete Adeney — who, as we previously explored, has near endless time for such pursuits — but it will push you to make straightforward repair, learning, or building projects a regular part of your routine.”
“As Clark incredulously pointed out, no matter what immediate benefits these services might provide the users, the net impact on their productivity and life satisfaction must be profoundly negative if all these users do is engage the service.”
“You can’t, in other words, build a billion-dollar empire like Facebook if you’re wasting hours every day using a service like Facebook.”
“Once you start constraining your low-quality distractions (with no feeling of lost value), and filling the newly freed time with high-quality alternatives (which generate significantly higher levels of satisfaction), you’ll soon begin to wonder how you ever tolerated spending so many of your leisure hours staring passively at glowing screens.”
“In 1727, Franklin created a social club called the Junto, which he describes as follows in his autobiography: I had form’d most of my ingenious acquaintance into a club of mutual improvement, which we called the Junto; we met on Friday evenings. The rules that I drew up required that every member, in his turn, should produce one or more queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discuss’d by the company; and once in three months produce and read an essay of his own writing, on any subject he pleased.”
“Few can mimic the energy Franklin invested into his social leisure, but we can all extract an important lesson from his approach to cultivating a fulfilling leisure life: join things.”
“You might be concerned that injecting more systematic thinking into your leisure life will rob it of the spontaneity and relaxation you crave for the time left over after your professional and family obligations. I hope to convince you that this concern is overblown. The weekly leisure planning process itself requires only a handful of minutes, and scheduling in advance some high-quality leisure activities hardly removes all spontaneity from your free time.”
“I’ve noticed that once someone becomes more intentional about their leisure, they tend to find more of it in their life.”
“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 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.”
“If your personal brand of digital minimalism requires engagement with services like social media, or breaking news sites, it’s important to approach these activities with a sense of zero-sum antagonism. You want something valuable from their networks, and they want to undermine your autonomy — to come out on the winning side of this battle requires both preparation and a ruthless commitment to avoiding exploitation.”
“Drawing on their experience developing corporate social listening programs, Jennifer recognizes the overwhelming noisiness of most social media streams, and the care and discipline required to find useful signals in this noise. With this in mind, Jennifer maintains separate Twitter accounts for their academic interests and side interest in music (Jennifer played in bands for years). Within each account, Jennifer invests significant effort in selecting who they follow — focusing on high-quality thinkers, or similar influencers in their topic area. In their academic account, for example, Jennifer follows a curated list of journalists, technologists, academics, and policy makers.”
“Have a careful plan for how you use the different platforms, with the goal of “maximizing good information and cutting out the waste.” To a social media pro, the idea of endlessly surfing your feed in search of entertainment is a trap (these platforms have been designed to take more and more of your attention) — an act of being used by these services instead of using them to your own advantage. If you internalize some of this attitude, your relationship with social media will become less tempestuous and more beneficial.”
“A well-known journalist recently told me that following a breaking story on Twitter gives him the sense that he’s receiving lots of information, but that in his experience, waiting until the next morning to read the article about the story in the Washington Post almost always leaves him more informed. Unless you’re a breaking news reporter, it’s usually counterproductive to expose yourself to the fire hose of incomplete, redundant, and often contradictory information that spews through the internet in response to noteworthy events.”
“Similarly, consider limiting your attention to the best of the best when it comes to selecting individual writers you follow. The internet is a democratizing platform in the sense that anyone can share their thoughts. This is laudable. But when it comes to reporting and commentary, you should constrain your attention to the small number of people who have proved to be world class on the topics you care about.”
“These products, which include, notably, a Kickstarter darling called the Light Phone, don’t replace your existing smartphone, but instead extend it to a simpler form.”
“Hollier and Tang posted a manifesto that opens with a diagram that reads: “Your [clock symbol] = Their [money symbol].”
“First Facebook, then the iPhone: compulsive communicating and connecting — supported by mysterious, almost magical innovations in radio modulation and fiber-optic routing — swept our culture before anyone had the presence of mind to step back and re-ask Thoreau’s fundamental question: To what end? The result is a society left reeling by unintended consequences. We eagerly signed up for what Silicon Valley was selling, but soon realized that in doing so we were accidently degrading our humanity.”
“Digital minimalism definitively does not reject the innovations of the internet age, but instead rejects the way so many people currently engage with these tools. As a computer scientist, I make a living helping to advance the cutting edge of the digital world. Like many in my field, I’m enthralled by the possibilities of our techno-future. But I’m also convinced that we cannot unlock this potential until we put in the effort required to take control of our own digital lives — to confidently decide for ourselves what tools we want to use, for what reasons, and under what conditions. This isn’t reactionary, it’s common sense.”
