Digital minimalism
Some days ago I finished reading Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport and, stealing a good habit from Stephen Cognetta I want to summarize what I got from the book in five points, while memories are still fresh.
Unlike Stephen I’ll elaborate a bit on the points in the hope to better fix concepts in my head.
1. Digital communication underuses our brain power
I’m always interested in evolutionary behaviors science. Newport mentions some very interesting studies about the neurological activity of our brain during idle time, according to which some areas of our brain automatically turns on when we are given a pause from deliberate, focused thinking. Those are the very same areas involved in processing face-to-face social interactions.
Social interactions require an incredible amount of brainpower spent guessing what others are thinking — or feeling — from thin nuances, body language, voice tone and the like. Natural selection hard-wired the complex mechanisms necessary to process this incredible amount of broadband information in our brains. It is so deep that we are not even aware of the intense activity and we don’t even experience it as fatigue. Instead it may even be exhilarating at times.
And we are unaware that, when left alone, our brain automatically starts elaborating on our social connections.
Now, the author highlights that low-bandwidth communications, like texting or hitting a heart-shaped icon are an insult to this incredibly sophisticated parts of our brains, that goes totally underused. In fact Newport properly tell communication apart from conversation, implying that we evolved to communicate by conversations.
Now one may argue that we mail (snail-mail I mean) each other from ages before WhatsApp was a thing, but ordinary letters are actually communications, not implying the expectation of real-time exchanges. This is not true for most modern, digital channels. I’m sure my reader (assuming she’s not reading Medium from a cave, that would be worth a shot at least) will have been subject at least once to complains about “not having replied me immediately”, be it to a business mail or the message of a anxious boyfriend.
So insulting our brains may already be labeled a bad deed, but I actually think the problem may be even worse: those areas don’t just get underused, they get misused. During real time text-only communications our brain must process a social interaction without resorting to the huge amount of analog signals that it’s expecting to come from being face-to-face; our refined empathic machinery is spun up but there is nothing for it to grind, so lacking the right input it produces the wrong output.
In the rare occasions I experienced talking to someone who gave little empathic feedback (was them fake or real), I experienced either anger or anxiety. Talking to someone that doesn’t give a damn about you is not only enraging, it also change the way you think, as Judy Rees cleverly demonstrated during her talk at Agile Business Day 2019 in Venice, with a quick experiment I took part to (by the way, at the time of writing it was yesterday — when they say just in time…).
So when we are reading comments on Facebook, trying to make a point on a Slack channel or commenting the last superhero movie on Reddit, we resort to a pale and fictitious surrogate of our faces: emoji. If you think those are good alternatives to in-presence (or at least voice) conversations, try to count how many time you wrote LOL, ROFL, or put a yellow dot in tears from intense laughing on a chat and you were actually laughing out loud, crying of joy or (er…) rolling over the floor laughing?! If I think about me, most of the time I don’t even happen to be smiling…
2. Attention exploitation is deliberate strategy
I quit socials a couple years ago. I still have my accounts but I almost never log in to them. I think I check my Facebook notices three to five times a year. It mostly happens casually, following a link my family or friends share with me on other channels. When it happens I usually quickly check the notifications and I never manage to find something that’s really of any interest. That’s not strange, since I don’t engage in the platform, the opposite would sound like black magic, actually.
About the wall (or stream, or how they call the infoflood today), I simply ignore it altogether.
Twitter is another platform I used to use a lot, but as of today I think I don’t log in since… who knows? Months? Years?
I access LinkedIn a bit more for work, to reply some usually unsolicited contact but I usually don’t venture outside direct messages.
Come what may, I can’t agree more with Newport about how much getting “networks” out of my social changed my life for the better. Still I want to point out that, even if it was a deliberate choice, it was not about socials, it was about me. It somehow happened, you know… doing what made me feel better. I did not (and still don’t) have any
What I never realized was that most of the socials’ issue that was annoying me and that ultimately drove my decision to quit was designed in such a way. Everybody know that socials take the worse out of us: outburst of anger, harsh commits, mockery… this is not unintended misuse by people, it’s not that socials are a worldwide experiment gone bananas. Successful socials are deliberately designed to fire your anger, give you small and frequent slot-machine-like awards and exploit all human bugs that allow other to take control of our attention. That may be why Google Plus failed: it was almost entirely out of the emotional orgy that happened elsewhere, it was quiet and (despite its very bad interface) it was home to some small, friendly community. It was more easy to use with intention because Google basically failed to implement strategies to force users into off-the-shelf products.
Now, attention exploitation is not new: since we track our history professional illusionists trick entire crowds into looking at a small card deck while in the background beautiful, blond twins sneak around the stage in fancy suits. How many time you stopped to appreciate the fact that illusionist audience are even aware that the person on the stage is trying to trick their perception? This is the most difficult situation in which you can fool someone: you alone, in plain sight, with hundreds of eyeballs on you. And it works anyway!
You will thus agree with me that it is way easier to exploit those “bugs” on an unaware crowd engaged in short-term, high-frequency, focus-shifting recreational communications.
The fact is that we can’t just grow defenses from this kind of exploitation. Our brain features, cognitive and non-cognitive biases, our “blind-spots”… all have been designed by evolution over hundreds of millions of years and it runs way below our conscious mind.
I think I was in a very lucky position: with kids, a family and a company to run requires a lot of attention, I grew fed of how much time socials was taking and how much low the quality of my real life experiences was. I just discovered enjoying a moment with my kids without informing all the world about it was adding, not subtracting to the experience. And at the same time, while I was reading a novel book, sneaking to my phone to check what was happening to people near and far was adding nothing to the experience, with the negative effect I loosed the thread.
This cake doesn’t seem to require icing, but let’s add that inability to focus makes us highly ineffective on the long term. To put a key concept of this book in my words, do you think that the guys who built a multi-hundreds-billions worth social network like Facebook would have achieved the same result if they were to use Facebook as they hope we do?
If you feel like reclaiming your awareness, being intentional in the use of technology is the key.
Ask yourself: for which kind of benefits am I trading the focus on my real life? Is it a good deal?
3. High-quality leisure is important
Now, this is really not something I had to read in a book, but I agree with this statement so much that I want to stress this out again and again. And again!
My primary source of misery is lacking time to engage in all the activities that bring me joy and satisfaction: handcrafting, playing music, build and repair things… you name it.
When I turned 30, a dear friend of mine gifted me with E. Fromm’s book To have or to be. I didn’t read the book yet at the time and I dove into it right after the party.
Much to my friend’s dismay I admit I didn’t finish it… the reason is that I quickly grew sick with the importance the philosopher gave to “being” over “having” (a point of view I totally agree with), while “doing” was totally missing in the equation. Being was promoted as a sort of lazy moral feat. Having was greedy, being was so utterly good and noble.
My point of view differs a bit from this and I think it is better explained by a quote from R. Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a book I enjoyed as a young adult. The following passage blow me away, so much that it stuck in my mind since then:
“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.” (R. Bradbury — Fahrenheit 451)
This says more about me that an entire page of self-endorsement.
I am what I do and as my wife told me once, I like to make things happen. Being held back for me is painful as is having little time to make more things happen. Often (even in the quote above) this kind of attitude translates to the will to impact or change the world somehow, in a recognizable and lasting way. But that’s not the point to me.
I instead enjoy the process, being in the flow, the joy and satisfaction that sparks from transforming puzzling and fatigue in a tangible outcome. It’s not pride, I don’t need an audience, not even with music (I decided to quit stages some years ago and I now just write songs at home, for the pleasure of doing so). Instead what I enjoy the most is the company of kindred spirits with which I can confront, think, work and share the satisfaction. Well deserved shoulder-patting makes me so happy!
Gary Rogowski, a furniture maker that now runs a woodworking school in Portland, in his book Handmade recognized that
Long ago we learned to think by using our hands, not the other way around.
I totally agree with this insight and I actually came to better understand many abstract topics, like linear algebra or Object Oriented Programming by building arte povera shoe racks or fixing my washing machine.
I can’t stress enough, if you never engaged in what Newport calls high-quality leisure, how important this is to your well being. Crafting, inventing, painting, playing, mending… you name it. But be active, be challenged, be satisfied of what your hands can do when you leave them free to enjoy themselves.
Is there some space for my cozy couch, you ask? Of course. Passive relax is also important to me but it’s mostly a diversion, a lull among moment of focused, intentional self-expression. Good leisure is mostly not relax, to me.
4. Adopting digital minimalism doesn’t mean turning back
When I discover myself disconnected from socials, mainstream media, and most mass-communication channel I started enjoy my newfound freedom to such extent that I’m currently deliberately ditching even WhatsApp/Telegram closed groups. I have a WA chat with my direct family members, a couple ones to coordinate my leisure and face-to-face social activities— like playing music or hanging out with lifetime friends — and that’s almost all. There are other groups but they are mostly permanently silenced. My phone is also on do not disturb mode by default, without exceptions. Important people know how to reach me in case of urgency. The rest can wait.
I’m basically refusing socials-mediated connections altogether. But I totally recognize there may be value in them.
For example, my business partner took in charge our company’s public exposition, while I lean more towards internal team management and interpersonal issues. That’s totally OK and I actually feel relieved by not having to venture in the bluster of Facebook, the plethora of noisy proposals on LinkedIn or the endless chatter on Twitter on a daily basis.
On the other end, as a professional I know that those channels are (like it or not) important to make your company or even personal brand recognizable and trustable on the market.
Here I think that the author did a great job in summarizing the whole point: technology is absolutely positive, as long as it serves you to support your real life goals and long term well-being, without sucking your time and attention. In Newport’s words:
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.
It’s incredible how we experience fear of missing out when we don’t have our phones at hand, while we never consider what we are really missing out in real life…
What I can testify to my readers who feel lost at the sole idea of living a less connected life, is this: you won’t lose anything that important.
5. Early retirement is a thing
I can’t help but close this post mentioning what they call FIRE (Financial Independence — Retire Early). Can’t even define it: is it a movement? A philosophy? A methodology?
Anyway I never heard about it and I’ve been sick with envy for a whole evening thinking about those guys that decided to go that route. How would it feel to have all the time of your life to engage in the high-quality leisure activities I mentioned above? Heck!
I won’t comment further on this but I’ll close this post listing what I would do, should I be financially independent today:
- Renovate my house entirely, by myself
- Put my point-n-click adventure game on rails and invest to make it real
- Learn to play the piano to an average level of proficiency so that I can write music faster (and awe someone at parties)
- Would spend two weeks every quarter volunteering for others to profit
- Would build a local community of tabletop role-playing gamers with the goal to introduce children and teenagers to the hobby
- Would spend some days in spring and some in autumn hiking and climbing the Alps with my wife
It seems I’m still able of dreaming after all!
Well, I won’t wait for my retirement to pursue some of those goals.
Conclusions
I didn’t get that much from the book in terms of revelations and practices. It as been a long confirmation bias ride all along and what I basically got is that I may label myself a Digital minimalist. I didn’t know it, now I do. Sciambola!
My opinion is this book may help a very narrow set of people.
Those who is totally unwilling to make the leap and quit the attention market arena won’t find that much inspiration here: Newport is piercing and lucid but (maybe being an academic, maybe being one that refused living a connected life in the very first place) I found it a bit too pedantic and detached. The book may sound like a sort of abstract exercise, or worse a way to advocate a sort of superior lifestyle.
Those who are considering the idea but have not enough guts to go on and unplug the cord are the real target of this book. I speculate about a 50% of them converted by the book alone.
Those like me, that already got rid of the digital noise may think there is little to take from the reading. Instead I urge you to rethink this position and read it anyway. During his long dissertation, Newport deals with many interesting topics, mentions many interesting cultural and historical events, surgically dissect false myths and, all in all, delivers a pleasant reading experience that leaves you what matters most: the will to learn more.
