## Highlights
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. (Location 100)
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. (Location 111)
Part 1 concludes by introducing my suggested method for adopting this philosophy: the digital declutter. (Location 119)
This process requires you to step away from optional online activities for thirty days. During this period, you’ll wean yourself from the cycles of addiction that many digital tools can instill, and begin to rediscover the analog activities that provide you deeper satisfaction. You’ll take walks, talk to friends in person, engage your community, read books, and stare at the clouds. (Location 121)
The second part of this book takes a closer look at some ideas that will help you cultivate a sustainable digital minimalism lifestyle. (Location 131)
the importance of solitude and the necessity of cultivating high-quality leisure to replace the time most now dedicate to mindless device use. (Location 133)
propose and defend the perhaps controversial claim that your relationships will strengthen if you stop clicking “Like” or leaving comments on social media posts, and become harder to reach by text messages. (Location 134)
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. (Location 148)
- đź’ Wow
What’s making us uncomfortable, in other words, is this feeling of losing control—a feeling that instantiates itself in a dozen different ways each day, such as when we tune out with our phone during our child’s bath time, or lose our ability to enjoy a nice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience. (Location 211)
“Philip Morris just wanted your lungs,” Maher concludes. “The App Store wants your soul.” (Location 241)
research on how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval. (Location 312)
Alter goes on to describe users as “gambling” every time they post something on a social media platform: Will you get likes (or hearts or retweets), or will it languish with no feedback? (Location 323)
“We’re social beings who can’t ever completely ignore what other people think of us.” (Location 352)
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. (Location 420)
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. (Location 436)
Emma found a different approach to a similar end when she discovered that she could bookmark the Facebook notifications screen, allowing her to jump straight to the page that shows posts from a graduate student group she follows—bypassing the service’s most distracting features. (Location 477)
- đź’ Action
THE PRINCIPLES OF DIGITAL MINIMALISM (Location 495)
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. (Location 1117)
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. (Location 1122)
As Holesh revealed, Alter is not an outlier. In fact, he’s remarkably typical: the average Moment user spends right around three hours a day looking at their smartphone screen, with only 12 percent spending less than an hour. The average Moment user picks up their phone thirty-nine times a day. (Location 1210)
Writing a letter to yourself is an excellent mechanism for generating exactly this type of solitude. It not only frees you from outside inputs but also provides a conceptual scaffolding on which to sort and organize your thinking. (Location 1474)
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. (Location 1551)
When given downtime, in other words, our brain defaults to thinking about our social life. (Location 1556)
Put another way, our brains adapted to automatically practice social thinking during any moments of cognitive downtime, and it’s this practice that helps us become really interested in our social world. (Location 1562)
The loss of social connection, for example, turns out to trigger the same system as physical pain—explaining why the death of a family member, a breakup, or even just a social snub can cause such distress. In one simple experiment, it was discovered that over-the-counter painkillers reduced social pain. (Location 1573)
After crunching the numbers, the researchers found that the more someone used social media, the more likely they were to be lonely. (Location 1625)
the more you use social media to interact with your network, the less time you devote to offline communication. “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.” (Location 1645)
The key issue is that using social media tends to take people away from the real-world socializing that’s massively more valuable. (Location 1651)
The small boosts you receive from posting on a friend’s wall or liking their latest Instagram photo can’t come close to compensating for the large loss experienced by no longer spending real-world time with that same friend. (Location 1654)
When you spend multiple hours a day compulsively clicking and swiping, there’s much less free time left for slower interactions. And because this compulsive use emits a patina of socialness, it can delude you into thinking that you’re already serving your relationships well, making further action unnecessary. (Location 1673)
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. (Location 1687)
“Face-to-face conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. We attend to tone and nuance.” On the other hand: “When we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits.” (Location 1698)
In this philosophy, connection is downgraded to a logistical role. This form of interaction now has two goals: to help set up and arrange conversation, or to efficiently transfer practical information (e.g., a meeting location or time for an upcoming event). Connection is no longer an alternative to conversation; it’s instead its supporter. (Location 1723)
When you unexpectedly find yourself free on a weekend afternoon, a quick round of text messages can efficiently identify a friend available to join you for a walk. Similarly, a social media service might alert you that an old friend is going to be in town, prompting you to arrange a dinner. (Location 1735)
- đź’ How we should be usin social media
Real conversation takes time, and the total number of people for which you can uphold this standard will be significantly less than the total number of people you can follow, retweet, “like,” and occasionally leave a comment for on social media, or ping with the occasional text. Once you no longer count the latter activities as meaningful interaction, your social circle will seem at first to contract. (Location 1743)
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 is the ultimate insult to our social processing machinery. (Location 1785)
Put simply, you should stop using them. Don’t click “Like.” Ever. And while you’re at it, stop leaving comments on social media posts as well. No “so cute!” or “so cool!” Remain silent. (Location 1791)
The reason I’m suggesting such a hard stance against these seemingly innocuous interactions is that they teach your mind that connection is a reasonable alternative to conversation. (Location 1792)
If you eliminate these trivial interactions cold turkey, you send your mind a clear message: conversation is what counts—don’t be distracted from this reality by the shiny stuff on your screen. (Location 1795)
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.” (Location 1811)
if you want to see if anyone has sent you something, you must turn on your phone and open the app. You can now schedule specific times for texting—consolidated sessions in which you go through the backlog of texts you received since the last check, sending responses as needed and perhaps even having some brief back-and-forth interaction before apologizing that you have to go, turning the phone back to Do Not Disturb mode, and continuing with your day. There (Location 1835)
The first is that it allows you to be more present when you’re not texting. Once you no longer treat text interactions as an ongoing conversation that you must continually tend, it’s much easier to concentrate fully on the activity before you. This will increase the value you get out of these real-world interactions. It might also provide some anxiety reduction, as our brains don’t react well to constant disruptive interaction (see the previous chapter on the importance of solitude). (Location 1838)
- đź’ MINDSET
The result is that both of you will be more motivated to fill this void with better interaction, as the relationship will seem strained in the absence of back-and-forth dialogue. (Location 1848)
Being less available over text, in other words, has a way of paradoxically strengthening your relationship even while making you (slightly) less available to those you care about. (Location 1849)
(it’s here that you should configure your Do Not Disturb mode settings to let in calls from a favored list). (Location 1857)
“I’d love to get up to speed on what’s going on in your life, call me at 5:30 sometime.” (Location 1879)
Put aside set times on set days during which you’re always available for conversation. (Location 1886)
by holding conversation office hours, you’ll be surprised by how many more of these rewarding interactions you can now fit into your normal week. (Location 1910)
contemplation is an “activity that is appreciated for its own sake . . . nothing is gained from it except the act of contemplation.” (Location 1919)
In this chapter, I call these joyful activities high-quality leisure. (Location 1927)
the psychological forces that lead us to compulsively use technology are typically best understood as moderate behavioral addictions—which (Location 1940)
the subversive decision to pursue FI at a young age, which typically leads to radical lifestyle decisions, self-selects for individuals who are unusually intentional about how they live their lives. (Location 1972)
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. (Location 1983)
In a representative passage, Bennett dismisses novels because they “never demand any appreciable mental application.” A good leisure pursuit, in Bennett’s calculus, should require more “mental strain” to enjoy (he recommends difficult poetry). (Location 2027)
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. (Location 2033)
- Tags: [[favorite]]
the value you receive from a pursuit is often proportional to the energy invested. We might tell ourselves there’s no greater reward after a hard day at the office than to have an evening entirely devoid of plans or commitments. But we then find ourselves, several hours of idle watching and screen tapping later, somehow more fatigued than when we began. (Location 2040)
Leisure Lesson Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption. (Location 2046)
Craft doesn’t necessarily require that you create a new object, it can also apply to high-value behaviors. Coaxing a pleasing song out of a guitar or dominating a game of pickup basketball also qualifies. These definitions of craft can also apply to the digital world, where activities like computer programming or video gaming similarly require skill, (Location 2050)
In a culture where screens replace craft, Crawford argues, people lose the outlet for self-worth established through unambiguous demonstrations of skill. (Location 2079)
In the absence of a well-built wood bench or applause at a musical performance to point toward, you can instead post a photo of your latest visit to a hip restaurant, hoping for likes, or desperately check for retweets of a clever quip. (Location 2081)
Craft allows an escape from this shallowness and provides instead a deeper source of pride. (Location 2084)
a deep activity like writing a piece of computer code that solves a problem (a high-skill effort) yields more meaning than a shallow activity like answering emails (a low-skill effort). (Location 2087)
Typing computer code into an advanced integrated development environment is not quite the same as confronting a plank of maple wood with a handheld plane. The former misses both the physicality and sense of unlimited options latent in the latter. (Location 2093)
fully embrace Rogowski’s closing advice: “Leave good evidence of yourself. Do good work.” This then provides our second lesson about cultivating a high-quality leisure life. Leisure Lesson Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world. (Location 2099)
When you sit down at a table to play a game in person with other people, you’re exposing yourself to what the game theorist Scott Nicholson calls “a rich multimedia, 3D interaction.” (Location 2118)
Playing games also provides permission for what we can call supercharged socializing—interactions with higher intensity levels than are common in polite society. (Location 2124)
This support helps push people past their natural limits, which is important; a core belief of CrossFit is that extreme intensity in a short period of time is superior to a large volume of exercise over a long period. (Location 2174)
The most successful social leisure activities share two traits. First, they require you to spend time with other people in person. As emphasized, there’s a sensory and social richness to real-world encounters that’s largely lost in virtual connections, (Location 2185)
The second trait is that the activity provides some sort of structure for the social interaction, including rules you have to follow, insider terminology or rituals, and often a shared goal. (Location 2187)
Leisure Lesson Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions. (Location 2191)
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: (Location 2224)
PRACTICE: FIX OR BUILD SOMETHING EVERY WEEK (Location 2238)
- đź’ Actionable
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. (Location 2263)
If you can achieve some degree of handiness, therefore, you can more easily tap into this type of satisfying activity. (Location 2266)
The simplest way to become more handy is to learn a new skill, apply it to repair, learn, or build something, and then repeat. Start with easy projects in which you can follow step-by-step instructions more or less directly. Once comfortable, advance toward more-complicated endeavors that require you to fill in some blanks or adapt what’s suggested. To be more concrete, here’s a sample list of the types of straightforward projects I had in mind for someone new to using their hands for useful purposes. Every example below is something that either I or someone I know was able to learn and execute in a single weekend. (Location 2270)
My suggestion is that you try to learn and apply one new skill every week, over a period of six weeks. (Location 2289)
PRACTICE: SCHEDULE YOUR LOW-QUALITY LEISURE (Location 2293)
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. (Location 2307)
by cultivating a high-quality leisure life first, it will become easier to minimize low-quality digital diversions later. (Location 2313)
You’re not quitting anything or losing access to any information, you’re simply being more mindful of when you engage with this part of your leisure life. (Location 2328)
When first implementing this strategy, don’t worry about how much time you put aside for low-quality leisure. It’s fine, for example, if you start with major portions of your evenings and weekends dedicated to such pursuits. (Location 2330)
you won’t feel like you’re missing many benefits. I conjecture that the vast majority of regular social media users can receive the vast majority of the value these services provide their life in as little as twenty to forty minutes of use per week. (Location 2334)
Franklin was relentlessly driven to be part of groups, associations, lodges, and volunteer companies—any organization that brought interesting people together for useful ends captured his attention as a worthwhile endeavor. (Location 2366)
PRACTICE: FOLLOW LEISURE PLANS (Location 2376)
A good seasonal plan contains two different types of items: objectives and habits that you intend to honor in the upcoming season. The objectives describe specific goals you hope to accomplish, with accompanying strategies for how you will accomplish them. The habits describe behavior rules you hope to stick with throughout the season. (Location 2390)
identified a concrete accomplishment that has clear criteria for completion and that can reasonably fit within a season. (Location 2403)
Each of the habits describes an ongoing behavior rule. They’re not dedicated to a particular objective, but instead are designed to maintain a background commitment to regular high-quality leisure in the planner’s life. (Location 2414)
the beginning of each week, put aside time to review your current seasonal leisure plan. After processing this information, come up with a plan for how your leisure activities will fit into your schedule for the upcoming week. (Location 2422)
In the middle of a busy workday, or after a particularly trying morning of childcare, it’s tempting to crave the release of having nothing to do—whole blocks of time with no schedule, no expectations, and no activity beyond whatever seems to catch your attention in the moment. These decompression sessions have their place, but their rewards are muted, as they tend to devolve toward low-quality activities like mindless phone swiping and half-hearted binge-watching. For the many different reasons argued in the preceding pages, investing energy into something hard but worthwhile almost always returns much richer rewards. (Location 2448)
- đź’ Mindset
“attention economy” describes the business sector that makes money gathering consumers’ attention and then repackaging and selling it to advertisers. (Location 2475)
you’re going to use social media, stay far away from the mobile versions of these services, as these pose a significantly bigger risk to your time and attention. This practice, in other words, suggests that you remove all social media apps from your phone. (Location 2566)
for people who did continue to use social media on their computers, their relationship to these services transformed. They began to sign in for specific, high-value purposes, (Location 2579)
PRACTICE: TURN YOUR DEVICES INTO SINGLE-PURPOSE COMPUTERS (Location 2585)
Freedom’s internal research reveals that its users gain, on average, 2.5 hours of productive time per day. (Location 2598)
“There’s an even deeper irony, and also a retro element, in the idea of taking a powerful productivity machine like a modern laptop computer and shutting down some of its core functions in order to increase productivity.” (Location 2600)
use tools like Freedom to aggressively control when you allow yourself access to any website or app supported by a company that profits from your attention. I’m not talking about occasionally blocking some sites when working on a particularly hard project. I want you instead to think about these services as being blocked by default, and made available to you on an intentional schedule. (Location 2631)
- đź’ Actionable
If you do need a particular social media tool for work (say, Twitter), then put aside a few blocks during the day when you can check it, and leave it otherwise blocked. (Location 2635)
Jennifer approach these tools differently than the average user. They seek to extract large amounts of value for their professional and (to a lesser extent) personal lives, while avoiding much of the low-value distraction (Location 2655)
In my experience, the key to sustained success with this philosophy 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 age of alluring devices. (Location 2883)
- đź’ Important