Cal Newport's Blog, page 25

On the Art of Learning Things (Ultra) Quickly

In the first chapter of Deep Work, I argue that the ability to concentrate is important in part because it’s necessary to learn hard things quickly, and in our economy, if you can pick up new skills or ideas fast, you have a massive competitive advantage.

Some readers subsequently asked me how to best deploy their concentration to achieve these feats of accelerated autodidacticism. My answer has been to direct people toward my longtime friend, and occasional collaborator, Scott Young, who has spent years mastering the art of mastering things (c.f., his MIT challenge.)

I’m happy to report that as of earlier this week, instead of simply waving vaguely in Scott’s general direction, I can now point to a brand new book that he’s published on the topic: Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career.

In this book, Scott walks through his step-by-step process of breaking down a major learning project and pushing it through to completion much faster than you might have imagined possible. It’s important to emphasize that he provides no short cuts. If anything, he highlights the surprising hardness — in terms of concentration and drive — required to succeed with these endeavors; a point I’ve been underscoring since my early books on study habits.

But if you’re willing to invest the energy, and are looking for the right techniques to make sure this energy is not wasted to the friction of ineffective activity, this is the book for you.

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On an unrelated note, my most recent New Yorker article was published earlier this week. It takes a look at the history of email and applies ideas from my academic field, the theory of distributed systems, to help explain what went wrong with this innovation. If you like this blog, you’ll like this article …

“It’s Like I Couldn’t Stop”: A Digital Minimalism Case Study

A scene from the undisclosed North Country location where I’ve been living a minimalist life dedicated to writing, parenting loud boys, and dreading the administrative demands of the upcoming fall semester.

It’s hard to believe that it has already been six months since Digital Minimalism was released. (If you’re interested in browsing some of the interviews and press about the book, I’ve been doing my best to update my media page with some highlights.)

One of the nice things about having had some time pass since publication is that I’m starting to receive case studies from readers who have been experimenting with ideas from the book long enough to report results. I thought it might be useful to occasionally share some of these stories, especially for those who are still deciding whether or not to take the plunge with this philosophy.

I’ll start today with the saga of a reader I’ll call Jane…

As Jane explained to me, she was first exposed to a culture of constant connectivity when she took a job in politics in 2006, an era when Blackberrys ruled the political universe.

“I remember having a boss yell at me once because I went to the bathroom and didn’t answer my phone,” she told me. “No joke, I was told I should have left my Blackberry with the front desk for someone to answer.”

When social media apps and iPhones came along, Jane was well positioned to dive deep into that well of distraction, with Twitter, Facebook and Instagram becoming her primary vices.

“I was constantly on my phone: checking, scrolling, tweeting, liking,” she said. “It’s like I couldn’t stop.”

The cost of this behavior went beyond simply the distraction, or the rudeness of checking the phone when with other people (“I couldn’t control it!”). As Jane explained, there was also an emotional and psychological toll:

“I felt exhausted and burned out. Instagram and FB made me feel like shit. Seeing everyone’s picture-perfect lives was stressful. I knew it was BS but still tried to keep up…[I] felt like I was my overseeing my own personal PR.”

Earlier this year, Jane read Digital Minimalism. The ideas intrigued her, but she was skeptical she could go through with the suggested changes: “[I] didn’t think I could actually do it.”

Then, as Jane puts it, “fate stepped in”: she left her iPhone in an Uber and it took her a week to get it back. She was forced against her will to temporarily experience life without a constant digital companion.

“At first, I was super stressed but then an amazing thing happened: I felt great,” she said. “Relaxed, calm, it’s like I could think clearly. My brain felt less crowded. It’s like someone went in and swept out the cobwebs.”

When the phone returned, she decided to give digital minimalism a serious try. Though this practice looks different for everyone who adopts it, in Jane’s case, it meant that she deleted Twitter, Facebook and Instagram altogether. She also added blocking software on her computer to deter idle web surfing.

“I can’t say enough about how much becoming a digital minimalist has changed my life,” she reports.

Specifically, Jane found that dumbing down her phone “freed up SO much time,” she now listens to podcasts and “reads a ton.”

The emotional improvements have also been big. “Not knowing what every single loose connection is doing on Instagram is amazing,” she said. “That’s what I’ve realized: I don’t need to get [daily] updates about people who aren’t actually in my day-to-day life.”

As a reminder, digital minimalism isn’t about minimizing technology for the sake of minimizing technology — which would be a weird philosophy for a computer scientist like myself to promote. It’s instead about putting tools to work on behalf of the things you value most, and then ignoring the distractions that don’t clear this high bar.

For Jane, constant social media checks and idle web surfing weren’t supporting the things that truly mattered to her, and if anything, they felt like obstacles between her and things she cared about. When she became intentional about her digital life, as with some many others who have made similar commitments, her real world existence became much richer.

The Dynamite Circle: A Long Tail Social Media Case Study

Photo by Samuel Chou.

The Dynamite Circle has been on the periphery of my radar since my early days as a blogger. It’s a small, subscription-based social network operated by the Tropical MBA web site, which caters to entrepreneurs running small businesses from exotic locations (I’ve been a guest on their podcast a couple times).

This network, abbreviated simply as DC, has around 1200 enthusiastic members. In theory, these individuals could have found each other and organized on existing major social media platforms, using custom hash tags and Facebook Groups, or perhaps gathering on a sub-reddit, or subscribing to each others’ Instagram feeds.

All of this would be free and supported by slick apps with polished interfaces.

Instead, DC members pay around $500 a year to access a custom set of private forums: there are no sophisticated image recognition algorithms auto-tagging photos, or machine learning models carefully selecting posts to maximize engagement. And no one seems to care.

To help understand what’s going on here, I asked co-founder Dan Andrews if he’d allow me to lurk around the DC network for an afternoon. He graciously agreed. What I discovered gets to the core of the long form social media phenomenon I’ve been writing about recently (c.f., 1, 2).

Here’s what members do on the DC network:

They ask questions and offer advice on issues that are hyper-specific to the unique challenges of running location-independent small businesses. Some recent discussion topics I stumbled across in my casual browsing included: sharing experiences about using coach.me to improve productivity habits; describing a tool that makes it easy to test web sites from multiple different browsers; and a discussion of local marketing techniques.They arrange real world meetings with each other. On the third Thursday of every month, in cities around the world, DC members setup real world gatherings of local members. Last Thursday, there were gatherings in San Francisco, Melbourne, New York, Bangkok, Austin, Monterey and Portland, to name just a few cities among many. Beyond these more regular gatherings, members seem eager to setup ad hoc meetings. I quickly came across a post from someone visiting the bay area, looking for a group with which to talk shop, and someone else seeking volunteers to join them in their upcoming mountain bike trip in Bali. As Dan explained to me, this coordination of offline connection is crucial: “there’s so so so much that’s happened ‘beyond the forum’ amongst members.” 

Large social media platforms are useful for easy distraction, yelling at famous people, and, more seriously, large-scale activism. But long tail alternatives offer something equally as powerful: real connection, freed from the artifice of the major services, with people you’d otherwise have a find time finding.

In the long tail, there’s no scrounging for attention, no trolls, no pile-ons by strangers who hubristically decree that you said the “wrong” thing, no desperate deception deployed through carefully curated photos, and, importantly, no compulsive over-use. Instead: just interesting people, putting aside some time to talk with some other interesting people in ways that makes their life better.

And on occasion, mountain biking together in Bali.

Blurring Offline and Online: More on the Potential of Long Tail Social Media

Photo by Ben Seidelman.

Earlier this week, I began a discussion about long tail social media. The premise behind this trend is that as our internet habits mature, we no longer need social platforms with massive user bases.

I’m cautiously optimistic about this model as I think niche networks can better deliver on the promise of the social internet while avoiding pitfalls like engineered addiction and emotional manipulation. (These smaller alternatives also tend to be better on the legal-techno geek issues like data privacy and effective contention moderation.)

In response to my recent post on this topic, a reader pointed me toward a fascinating long tail social media case study that I wanted to briefly share, as I think it helps underscore the potential of this movement.

In 2017, serial entrepreneur Gina Bianchini launched a new startup called Mighty Networks. Fellow net nerds might remember Bianchini from her 2007 company, Ning, which let users setup their own customized social networks. Ning was ahead of its time, as it launched in a period when most people were largely unfamiliar with social networking. Mighty Networks is trying again: but this time focused on mobile devices and pitching to an audience much more familiar with this mode of interaction.

The basic idea is that individuals use the software to setup custom social networks for their existing communities. The network operates like a fancy Facebook Group, with discussions divided into topics that you can easily browse and join. It also makes it easy to setup mastermind groups, virtual conferences, and offer courses.

The example networks I saw were focused (a couple thousand users at most), and typically charged subscription fees from the users (eliminating the need to sell ads or harvest data).

The feature, however, that really piqued my interest, and instigated this post, is the ability to find community members near you in the physical world.

To be more concrete, consider the specific Mighty Network that was originally brought to my attention: The Little Black Dress Academy — a small-size, exclusive social network for women business leaders.

If you’re a member of this network, and enjoy the discussions, you’re encouraged to use a built-in feature that lets you find women leaders who live nearby so you can setup offline get togethers. Similarly, if you’re traveling, you can find members in the city you’re visiting and setup an impromptu coffee date or dinner — injecting a jolt of extra value into the trip.

This blurring of the offline and online would never work on a mass market platform like Facebook or Twitter — could you imagine! — but on small networks, made up of paying members with pre-existing bonds, it provides a major boost to the social value the online tool generates.

This is just an isolated example, but it hints at an intriguing conclusion I’ve been interrogating in my recent work: perhaps in attempting to consolidate the social internet into a small number of massive platforms, we were accidentally stripping away much of the potential of this technology to actually make us more social.

Thinkspot and the Rise of Long Tail Social Media

Last month, Jordan Peterson announced he was launching his own social media platform called Thinkspot. Details of the planned service are still sketchy, but it seems like it will include some novel features, such as subscription fees that support the content creators, and a commenting system meant to encourage deeper discussion.

Much of the early press coverage of Thinkspot has focused on the controversies surrounding Peterson and the tumultuous circumstances that led to the service’s creation.

To me, however, there’s a more interesting story lurking. What matters is not why Thinkspot exists, or even whether it will succeed, but instead the larger trend it represents.

The first generation of social media companies adopted a mass audience model: their value proposition depended on gathering the largest possible user base. You joined Facebook, in part, because of the promise that many people you already know were members, and you browsed YouTube because of the promise that it could offer an endless library of clips.

This model naturally supports monopoly and suppresses innovation. It’s conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley that a big reason why there have been no major social media platforms launched since 2011 is that it’s impossible for a new entrant to compete with the value produced by the massive audiences of the existing sites.

Why would I join a network with 10,000 users when one already exists with over 1,000,000,000?

As Thinkspot demonstrates, however, this mass audience strategy is starting to fray. As users become more familiar with both the joys and depredations of the attention economy, they’re increasingly shifting toward a long tail model for the social internet.

In this new model, users don’t want to connect with everyone they already know, but instead want to connect with small groups they find really interesting. Similarly, they don’t need access to massive libraries of low-quality content, but instead want access to curated collections covering topics they really care about.

The old model requires massive audiences before a given platform becomes useful. The new model does not.

If you’re deeply committed to the Intellectual Dark Web, for example, then Thinkspot will probably return you much more value than Instagram or Twitter, even though its audience size is a minuscule fraction of these giants.

Similar micro-platforms could be created for almost any other targeted interest that you can imagine, from paleo enthusiasts, to the FIRE community, to cricket fans, to Christian parents.

(See my recent New Yorker article on indie social media for more on some of the new tools that simplify the task of creating these new platforms.)

Put another way: In the world of long tail social media, network effects are much less important than interesting networks.

The internet, of course, has long been home to small communities dedicated to niche topics, organizing themselves through loose collections of websites, blogs, and existing social platforms.

The key insight of long tail social media — as epitomized by Thinkspot — is that there’s value in creating more unified and optimized online homes for these small communities: reducing the friction required for interaction and increasing its quality; yet also sidestepping the mass audience model’s imperative to grow your service as big as possible.

I’m not sure if this long tail model will successfully supplant the mass audience strategy that dominates today (any time there are hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, disruption is complicated). I hope, however, that it does, as it would almost certainly increase the value people get out of the internet, while helping to reduce some of the worst side-effects of our current dependence on rapacious platform monopolies.

Senator Hawley on Social Media: “addiction is actually the point.”

Photo by Natureofthought.

Early last month, Josh Hawley, the newly-elected senator from Missouri, gave a speech about big tech at the Hoover Institute. He made a couple points that caught my attention, such as when he said this:

“Social media only works as a business model if it consumes users’ time and attention day after day after day. It needs to replace the various activities we did perfectly well without social media, for the entire known history of the human race with itself. It needs to replace those activities with time spent on social media. So that addiction is actually the point.”

And this:

“This is what some of our brightest minds have been doing with their time for years now. Designing these platforms, designing apps that integrate with them. I mean, what else might they have been doing?”

I was pleased to hear Senator Hawley emphasize these issues of addictiveness and value because they echo the concerns I heard from the vast majority of people I met during the book tour for Digital Minimalism.

It’s important to hear public figures cite these problems, because as I’ve written before, much of the media coverage on the big tech backlash focuses on what I call legal-techno geek issues, such as privacy, data portability, and content moderation.

These are important topics, and if you’re a journalist, or a social media personality, or an academic, or a political think tank type, they can be quite exciting to debate and nuance. They also have the advantage of being addressable by big swing legislative fixes, which are satisfying to imagine. (Indeed, in the recent New Yorker review of Digital Minimalism, the reviewer’s main criticism was that I avoided suggesting such systemic fixes.)

But for the average person — who doesn’t host a YouTube interview show, or cover politics, or publish research papers on network privacy — the legal-techno geek issues are not why they’re uneasy about their devices.

What they really care about is the fact that they’re looking at these glowing screens more than they know is useful or healthy, and to the exclusion of things that are more important. They care that their relationship with services like social media and streaming videos is leeching quality from their life.

So I think Senator Hawley got this right in his Hoover Institute speech. Which is why I was somewhat resigned to learn that just yesterday he introduced a piece of legislation that fell back into core techno-legal geek topics (in this case, regulating content moderation policies).

The listless and anxious 25-year-old, compulsively swiping and tapping his smartphone, bleeding away life force with each steam whistle tweet or Instagram artifice, won’t be helped if Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 is repealed. But if this same 25-year-old learns exactly how his devices have been sapping his natural drive, and is shown what he might do about it, he will have a real shot at serious improvement.

We need more focus on what Senator Hawley talked about last month at the Hoover Institute, and probably a little less focus on the types of issues he’s now attempting to legislate. It’s not that the latter are meaningless, it’s just that fixing them won’t by itself provide meaning to those lost in their screens.

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My long-time friend Scott Young has a new book coming out in August called Ultralearning . I’ve been talking with Scott about this book since it was still just an inkling of an idea, and I couldn’t be more excited about the way it turned out. I’ll provide a real review when it’s launched, in the meantime, however, if you’re thinking about it buying it, consider doing so early to reap the pre-order rewards Scott is offering (which include an interview with yours truly).

Naval Ravikant, Email, and the Future of Work

In a recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Naval Ravikant referenced economist Ronald Coase’s 1937 paper, “The Nature of the Firm,” which later helped Coase win a Nobel prize.

The mathematical details of this paper are dense, but on Rogan’s show, Ravikant summarizes its core idea: firms hire more people instead of contracting out the needed work when the transaction costs associated with setting up external relationships are high, making it easier and cheaper to do the work internally.

As Ravikant notes, the internet is driving down these transaction costs as it reduces the friction required for an entrepreneur to find and hire the right contractor for a specific task. Coase’s theory predicts therefore that businesses will become smaller and more people will migrate from stable positions to a freelance lifestyle.

I was intrigued by this discussion because it overlaps with some concepts that I’ve been developing as I work on a new book about email and the future of work.

The book in question (which is still very much in the early stages) documents how in the 1990s, as digital communication tools like email swept through front offices, many organizations implicitly adopted a workflow I call the hyperactive hive mind.

This workflow has employees coordinate by maintaining an ongoing, unstructured electronic conversation through inboxes and (increasingly) Slack channels — essentially scaling up the way small groups in the same physical location would naturally work together.

The advantage of the hive mind is that it’s flexible and adaptive. (As Henry Ford learned as he developed the assembly line: rigid, complicated work processes are a huge pain.)

The disadvantage, however, is that the constant communication demands of the hive mind conflict with the way human brains function, significantly decreasing productivity and making people miserable.

My prediction is that in the near future we’ll see a movement away from the hyperactive hive mind workflow as more and more firms trade its simplicity and convenience for approaches to work that produce more value — even if they’re more rigid and annoying.

(As Henry Ford also learned, the pain of figuring out the assembly line was worth it, because it produced cars 10x faster than the easier methods it replaced.)

Which brings us back to Naval Ravikant and Ronald Coase.

I increasingly believe that one of the hidden impacts of the hyperactive hive mind is that it inflates external transaction costs. This happens because the hive mind has a way of muddying up internal work into countless informal requests and unstructured conversations, archived haphazardly into ad hoc collections of old messages.

In an age of Gmail and Slack, work has been largely reduced to employees opening up their inboxes and chat channels and then just rock n’ rolling — hoping that the cumulative impact of this back-and-forth busyness moves the needle in the right direction. It’s often not easy to extract clearly defined chunks of effort from this chaotic chatter.

If my prediction is correct, and we seem more firms moving away from the hyperactive hive mind toward more structured approaches to work, then it will suddenly become easier for them to contract with the external market.

This shift would amplify the Coase effect that Ravikant described on Rogan’s podcast, perhaps making the move toward smaller firms and more freelancing even more pronounced than expected.

I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but we should be aware of it. The more I study the future of work, the more I recognize the transience and fragility of the way so many of us currently approach our jobs (c.f., my recent take on the weird state in which academia currently finds itself).

If you’re striding confidently through the doors of your large firm, arriving early to get a jump on your inbox, smugly believing that after just a couple quick decades we’ve already mastered the most efficient ways to produce knowledge work in an age of computer networks, there are likely some big surprises in store for you in the years ahead…

Franklin Foer on Devoted Attention

Photo by JR P.

Last month, Franklin Foer, one of my favorite techno-philosophers, wrote an essay for The Atlantic that caught my attention.

He revealed that he started a daily poetry reading habit to “sharpen the faculties that stare at the world,” with the aim to “bulwark my attention against the assault waged by my phone.”

He soon rediscovered the work of Mary Oliver, who died earlier this year. In reading her final poetry collection, Upstream, Foer was surprised to discover that Oliver helped him confront the very forces that had driven him to his bulwark-building poetry habit in the first place.

“The costs of allowing our attention to be commandeered remain drastically understated,” Foer writes, and though this might not have been her specific intention, Oliver’s “poetry captures its spiritual costs.”

Foer is drawn in particular to the title poem of the collection, which tells the story of a girl separated from her parents in the woods, who finds herself, perhaps for the first time, really noticing the world around her.

As Foer explains:

“The piece concludes with a sentence that implants itself in the brain, because it is, in fact, so far upstream from the way we live: ‘Attention is the beginning of devotion.’ And, of course, this is so. The unnoticed can’t possibly be loved.”

 I stumbled across a related sentiment when researching Deep Work. In the chapter where I mull the existential significance of focus, I found myself, to my initial surprise, drawing on the philosophers Hurbert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly’s secularized counterstrike against nihilism, All Things Shining.

In this book, Dreyfus and Kelly locate grounded meaning in craft. When you confront the physical world and struggle to manifest your intentions, you encounter attributes and properties — some good, some bad, some occasionally sublime — that exist distinct from your subjective, narcissistic episteme.

They point to the example of the wheelwright subordinated to the properties of wood that enable successful wheel shaping. In learning these truths, they argue, the wheelwright is encountering the sacred.

Both the poetry of Oliver and the philosophizing of Dreyfus and Kelly point toward a common truth: life cannot blossom into its true potential until you embrace the challenge of paying attention to what is in front of you right now.

The algorithmically-mediated alternatives presented through glowing screens will never spark the same devotion.

On the Pleasures and Sorrows of Life Without Screens

Photo by Marketa.

I recently received a message from a friend of mine, a young man named Mike. He told me that Digital Minimalism had changed his life. Naturally, I asked him to elaborate what he meant.

In response, he listed the following changes:

He lost 15 pounds and dropped his body fat by six percentage points; he went from being terrible at dancing to pretty good (he sent me a video of him in a dance circle to prove this claim); he developed a Brazilian Ju-Jitsu practice; he strengthened many relationships.

This list might seem surprising: my book is about technology, and yet none of the changes listed by Mike seem to have anything to do with social media or smartphone settings. But as I’ve learned over the past few months, his experience is actually quite common among those who take the minimalist plunge.

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When people contemplate the declutter process I suggest in my book, in which you spend 30 days away from optional technology as a prelude to simplifying your digital life, they often predict that the main challenge will be compensating for the benefits and features they’ll miss out on.

But this prediction is almost always wrong. Most people report that after a week or so of some mild withdrawal symptoms, they’re surprised by how little they miss the features of services like Twitter or Instagram.

The real problem — and this surprised me — is figuring out how to deal with all the free time this move toward minimalism suddenly injects into your life.

Here’s how a reader named Laurie described the experience of going through my digital declutter:

 “I learned that a lot of actions in my day are mindless. We all have much more time than we think we do; we just fill it with lots of scrolling.”

…

“Here’s what I realized: I am addicted to using my phone, specifically, using my phone to curtail boredom during ‘free periods’ in my life…My problem, which is apparently common amongst people who have done this same digital fast, is that I didn’t have a good downtime activity to engage in.”

Another reader, a philosophy professor named Anna, put it this way:

“I was left with a lot of silence.  What do I do in the evening after work when I’m home alone and really tired and it’s raining hard outside?…In the beginning, I spent a significant amount of time being bored.  I wandered the house in circles looking for something to do.”

We convince ourselves that we use our phones to fill in occasional idle moments, but stories like Laurie and Anna’s point toward a more troubling conclusion. Perhaps we initially used our phones in this manner, but over time, their role expanded, subtly pushing aside other, more sustaining activities in our lives.

Like the once purely social drinker who ends up hiding empty beer cans from his family, all this tapping and swiping has a way of shifting from an occasional distraction to a default behavior. So when you finally remove it, you’re suddenly left with a whole mess of “silence,” just you and your feelings, and an uneasy sense of not knowing what to do next.

Which brings us back to Mike.

* * * *

Faced with the sudden stretches of free time generated by minimizing his digital life, Mike decided to aggressively fill in these blanks.

He began by following my recommendation from Chapter 4 to inject more solitude into his life. He deployed what he called the “AOB method” with his phone (as in “Airplane mode, Off, and in my Bag”), to force himself to regularly be alone with his own thoughts and start getting in touch with what he cared about, what he was missing, and, most importantly, what he wanted to do with himself.

Because Mike is young (in his 20s), much of his socializing happened online, so he also decided to take proactive steps to replace this sense of connection after minimizing his digital life.

To do so, he instituted regular “office hours” each week — prescheduled time periods during which his challenge was to connect with people he cared about, either in person or on the phone.

As Mike explained to me, he ended up getting back in touch with people he hadn’t really talked to in years, and the longform analog conversation fostered a sense of connection deeper than anything he had experienced in recent memory.

Finally, Mike made a list of the concrete personal goals he wanted to pursue. He recruited a “board of directors” — an expert mentor for each goal — to help direct him and hold him accountable. It didn’t take long before the accomplishments that opened this essay began to pile up.

Laurie and Anna had similar experiences.

Though Laurie reports she’s still looking to “develop a quality leisure activity,” she’s been investing heavily into real world interactions with her friends:

I’ve met with friends for lunch, hung out with friends casually, hung out with family casually, played tennis with friends, run with friends. I even spent a weekend away with my running friends from New Hampshire.

Anna, for her part, also parlayed her boredom into more meaningful activities:

“I wrote a letter to a friend who is struggling right now and I wrote cards to some graduating seniors at my college.  I texted a friend and made plans for getting together over the weekend.  I practiced yin yoga.  And I went to bed early.”

She ended up cancelling the Netflix subscription she previously relied on to escape from life.

* * * *

This is all really hard work. It’s much easier to simply fill your time posting to Instagram or passively gorging on autoplayed video.

But Laurie reports a reduction in anxiety and stress, coupled with an improved mood.

Anna gave the following summary: “I noticed that I felt better.  Calmer.  More in touch with who I want to be and with what matters to me.”

And I’ve never seen Mike happier.

Novelist Mark Haddon Quit Twitter. Not Because It’s Terrible, But Because It Prevents Him From Being Great

Photo by Luis Marina.

Last week, the British novelist Mark Haddon wrote an essay for the Financial Times about his recent decision to take a break from Twitter. What I liked about this piece is that it unpacked a nuanced back-and-forth thought process about social media.

Many of the narratives surrounding these services stumble toward an extreme: social media ruined democracy! social media is more important than the printing press!

The people I talked to while researching Digital Minimalism, however, tended to report a more conflicted experience. Not unlike a once happy relationship that’s begun to sour, they can easily list things they like about services like Instagram or Facebook, but ultimately, with a shake of the head, they conclude that keeping it in their life is no longer sustainable.

This is the story Haddon tells.

The bulk of his article lists the many novelties and happy swerves of attention that Twitter provided him. But he still felt he needed to walk away. Why? Here’s his pithy explanation:

“I am taking a long break because every tweet had begun to feel like a peep of steam through my whistle — Listen to me! Listen to me! — which reduced the boiler pressure I needed to write another novel.”

And so it is in the real world with many who find their patience wearing thin with social media: it’s nice; it’s sometimes spectacular; but in the end, it has a way of bleeding away the steam of life, one interrupted moment at a time, until you find yourself no longer tackling the harder, analog, striving endeavors that make a good life good.

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Speaking of the pros and cons of social media, my friend (and immensely talented filmmaker) Rob Montz recently released a powerful, short documentary on the harm Instagram is causing among teenagers. Take a look.