Newport, C. (2019). Digital minimalism: Choosing a focused life in a noisy world. Penguin.
Introduction
“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity” – Henry David Thoreau
“You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and revenant life” – Marcus Aurelius
Digital declutter: Aggressive action of stepping away from online activities for 30 days.
Part 1 – Foundations
Chapter 1 – A Lopsided Arms Race
- Many of the changes caused by social media were unexpected and unplanned – even as they were massive and transformational.
- Social media apps/site make us use them more than we think is healthy.
- People are susceptible to social media’s compulsion because a lot of money has been invested into making their use inevitable.
- ‘…checking your likes is the new smoking…’ – Bill Maher (2017)
- The two drivers of social media addiction are intermittent positive reinforcement and drive for social approval.
- The thought process that went into building these applications was… ‘How do we consume as much of your time and attention as possible”
- Early-stage social media had no “like” button. People focused on just finding and sharing information. This is what is salient in people’s mind when they think about the benefits of social media.
- Human nature evolved to attach importance to social cues, including signals of social approval.
Chapter 2 – Digital Minimalism
- The goal of digital minimalism is to spend your online time on selected activities that supports things I value (for me, this should be Christian rhema, notes from books I have read or highlights from books I have written or plan to write).
- In Thoreau’s book ‘Walden’, he describes an economic theory built from the following axiom: “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”
- When people extol the virtues of social media, the opportunity cost of the time and effort spent on social media is not readily salient to them
- The goal is to treat the minutes of our lives as a tangible, concrete resource which we must best allocate to the ends that are most valuable to us.
- Amish philosophy: Start from values and work backwards to see whether a new technology supports or hinders those values
Chapter 3 – The Digital Clutter
No notes taken.
Part 2 – Practices
Chapter 4 – Spend Time Alone
- Solitude doesn’t necessarily mean physical separation. Solitude is more about what’s going on in your mind as opposed as to what’s going on in the environment. It connotes a state whereby the mind is free from input from other minds. It requires moving beyond reacting to other people’s thoughts and focusing on your own thoughts and experiences.
- “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone” – Blaise Pascal
- Rejecting close bonds during solitude provide a greater appreciation for interpersonal relationship when they eventually occur.
- “… we are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate” – Thoreau
- Consumer goods can change the culture of a people. Not many people wore headsets to work in the early 1990’s. That changed with the iPod and portable music
- Previous technologies only interrupted solitude occasionally. The iPod was one of the first new technologies capable of interrupting solitude continually
- Solitude can clarify problems, regulate emotions, help build moral courage and strengthen relationships. By continually interrupting solitude, we miss out on these.
- Humans were not “not wired, to be constantly wired”
- “Only thoughts reached by walking have value” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- The art of writing is one of the most potent tools for forcing oneself into productive solitude
Chapter 5 – Don’t Click Like
- When not engaged in a specific cognitively demanding task, the brain reverts to the “default network” (technically called the task induced deactivation network) which is essentially the same parts of the brain that lights up during social cognition experiments
- “We are interested in the social world because we are built to turn on the default network during our free time” – Matthew Lieberman (2013 book, Social)
- It just happens that social media hijacks the brains tendency to switch to the default the network when not engaged in cognitively demanding work
- Social media tends to take people away from more valuable real-world socialization
- In-person communications require sensitivity to a lot of information in order to respond appropriately. Online communication, on the other hand, is dependent on low bandwidth pixels
- Chronic online communication simulates real in-person communication and can deceive one into believing that one is already serving their in-person relationships adequately – which may not be the case
- There is a difference between low bandwidth online interactions (connection) and high bandwidth real-world encounters between humans (conversation)
- Conversation is the only form of interaction that will maintain a relationship. This is because in conversations, the two parties exchange high bandwidth cues such as voice tone or facial expressions. Any communication that does not allow the transmission of high-bandwidth cues (social media, email, text) falls under connection
- Connection interactions are not bad themselves. They can be used to set up high bandwidth conversations, or to transmit practical information (e.g., location or time of meeting)
- The more you invest in conversations, over connections, you develop ‘relative price sensitization’ where the more time and effort you devote, the greater the increasing magical returns.
Chapter 6 – Reclaim Leisure
- Philosophy of the financial independence movement: “If you can reduce your living expenses, you can increase your savings rate and attain your financial independent goals quicker”
- Expending more energy on leisure can energize you. A good example of this is craft
- “Boasting is what a boy does, who has no effect in the world, but craftsmanship must reckon with the infallible judgement of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away” – Matthew Crawford
- Social media is marketed as how they facilitate connection. Yet, no one who spends a lot of time engaged in social media connection will be able to achieve anything of value
- It is good idea to schedule ahead of time, periods for low-quality leisure (e.g., social media, streaming etc.)
- In as little as 40 minutes per week, one can maximise the benefits of social media use
- The more intentional you are about leisure, the more of it you find
Chapter 7 – Join the Attention Resistance
- Before 1830 (when Benjamin Day launched the ‘New York Sun’ – the first penny press newspaper), publishers saw the publication as the product which they sold to willing consumers. What Benjamin Day did was convert his readers to the product and then sell their attention to advertisers
- Market valuation of Facebook at a point (circa 2019) was greater than that of Exxon Mobil. In other words, attention is the new oil. In 2024, Exxon Mobil’s price per share was $120 compared to Facebook’s $511
- The general innovation of the computer was the fact that it was general purpose
- The Dunbar number of 150 is the theoretical limit on the number of people a human can maintain social relationships with. Social media tries to inflate this figure for everyone, but the tradeoff is the quality of conversations that one is able to make.
- The slow media philosophy: Shift attention away from the casual consumption of fast, ephemeral social media to producing and consuming higher quality media
- An example of high-quality media is reporting done after journalists have had time to process it (compared to faster breaking news that is always lower in quality)
- Focus attention to a small number of people who have proven to be world-class on the topics you care about
- For news-related media, look for the best argument against your preferred position.
