Cal Newport's Blog, page 27

On Sam Harris and Stephen Fry’s Meditation Debate

Photo by Sam Harris.

A few weeks ago, on his podcast, Sam Harris interviewed the actor and comedian Stephen Fry. Early in the episode, the conversation took a long detour into the topic of mindfulness meditation.

Harris, of course, is a longtime proponent of this practice. He discusses it at length in his book, Waking Up, and now offers an app to help new adherents train the skill (I’ve heard it’s good).

What sparked the diversion in the first place is when, early in the conversation, Fry expressed skepticism about meditation. Roughly speaking, his argument was the following:

Typically when we find ourselves in a chronic state of ill health it’s because we’ve moved away from something natural that our bodies have evolved to expect.Paleolithic man didn’t need gyms and diets because he naturally exercised and didn’t have access to an overabundance of bad food.Mindfulness mediation, by contrast, doesn’t seem to be replicating something natural that we’ve lost, but is instead itself a relatively contrived and complicated activity.

Harris’s response was to compare meditation to reading. They’re both complicated (read: unnatural) activities, to be sure, but they’re both really important in helping our species thrive.

Fry, who is currently using and enjoying Harris’s meditation app, conceded, and the discussion shifted toward a new direction.

I wonder, however, whether Fry should have persisted. Rousseauian romanticism aside, there’s an important application of evolutionary psychology undergirding his instinctual concern.

For one thing, the reading analogy is tenuous. Reading is a technology that radically accelerated cultural evolution — a tool that helped us achieve new goals.

Meditation, by contrast, is more palliative than instrumental, especially in its modern secular applications. It’s meant to soothe mental dis-ease, not to unlock accomplishment previously unobtainable to our species.

This motivates the question of why we need this soothing in the first place. It’s unlikely that our paleolithic ancestors existed in a state of persistent anxiety and stress, so the negative sensations we use meditation to reduce must have a more modern origin.

This is the point I think Stephen Fry was orbiting with his skepticism.

He wasn’t arguing that mindful meditation doesn’t work, as the evidence suggests that it is really quite effective, which is why I think the work Sam Harris (and Jon Kabat-Zinn before him) are doing in promoting this practice to a wider audience is vital and important.

Fry was instead correctly noting that meditation is an unnatural solution to a modern problem. Meditation helps, but it doesn’t solve the underlying issues .

What, Fry seems to be asking, is the cognitive equivalent of the natural behaviors like exercising and healthy eating that our species used to enjoy but are now missing in modern life?

I’m not the first to ask this question, and many people have proposed compelling answers (see, for example, Mark Sisson and John J. Ratey).

But something that became increasingly clear to me as I was researching Digital Minimalism, and the reason why I’m bringing up this topic in the first place, is that in recent years, our relationship with our screens has almost certainly exasperated this modern separation from a more natural way of living .

A big part of waking up, in other words, should probably involve powering down.

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Speaking of Digital Minimalism, I want to share a few housekeeping notes. First, I’m happy to report that the book debuted as a  New York Times ,  Wall Street Journal ,  Publisher Weekly , and  USA Today  bestseller — so thank you all for your support.

On the same topic: if you pre-ordered the book, but forgot to fill out the form to receive the promised bonuses, send an email to digitalminimalism@penguinrandomhouse.com and we will help get you squared away.

Minimalism Grows…

Me speaking about Digital Minimalism at Company HQ in New York City on Monday Night.

I only rarely write administrative posts, but because this is the launch week for my new book, I figured I’m due a break on this rule. With this in mind, I want to share a few more interesting pieces of news coverage on Digital Minimalism.

Before I do, two quick notes:

First, if you live in the Washington, DC area, come see me at Politics & Prose at 3:30 on Saturday . I’ll be taking questions and signing books.Second, if you’re pretty sure you’re going to buy the book, but haven’t yet, I want to nudge you to do so soon . (For various technical reasons, sales made before Saturday night are very useful from a bestseller list perspective. Okay, last time I’ll mention that…)

On to the publicity updates:

Amazon’s editors named Digital Minimalism one of the 10 best nonfiction books of the month, USA Today included it in its roundup of “5 books not to miss” this month, and Time called it one of the 15 New Books to Read This February.Earlier today, I was interviewed on the popular NPR show Here & Now and appeared live on Tech News Weekly .Written interviews with me also appeared in USA Today, Fatherly, and Ryan Holiday’s Daily Stoic newsletter.If you’re interested in book excerpts, you can find them at both NPR and TED.On the podcast front, more episodes with me are beginning to trickle out (with more to come), including: Mark Hyman’s podcast, The Art of Manliness, The Accidental Creative, Productivityst, Tropical MBA, The Buyer’s Mind, Curious Minds, and OPTIMIZE with Brian Johnson.

Many of you have been asking me to create a running list of all of my podcast appearances, interviews, and articles. We’re working on it, stay tuned…

The Beginning of a Digital Revolution?

It’s hard for me to believe that we’re finally here, but my new book, Digital Minimalism, comes out on Tuesday.

The early buzz about the book has exceeded my expectations, which helps validate a trend that I’ve been noticing over the past year or so: people seem like they’re finally ready to consider serious changes to their relationship with digital tools.

To help get you as excited as I am, I’ve included below a sampling of some of the early press on the book.

(Also remember, as I detailed last week, if you pre-order a copy by Tuesday, you get some immediate bonuses, and if you pre-order a second copy, you get access to a private Q&A group. More details here…)

Digital Minimalism Buzz



Steve Jobs Never Wanted Us To Use Our Smartphone Like This. (the New York Times). This is my op-ed from last week’s New York Times. It became their most emailed article of the weekend. It’s Not Too Late to Quit Social Media. (the Wall Street Journal). I was the Weekend Interview in last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. Cal Newport on Why We’ll Look Back on Smartphones Like Cigarettes (GQ). A wide-ranging interview with GQ’s Clay Skipper. The marketing team at my publisher told me that this continues to create a stir on social media (ironically). How to Be a Digital Minimalist — The Rules (The Times of London). A sharp piece in The Times of London. Calls my new book an: “eloquent, powerful wail of despair against the ‘attention merchants’, but also an enjoyably practical guide to cutting back on screen time.” Cal Newport Has an Answer for Digital Burnout (The Ezra Klein Show). My recent interview on the new book with Ezra Klein. For those eager for more podcast content from me, worry not, I am doing a lot of podcast interviews that will begin releasing next week. How Behavioral Economics Helped Kick my Phone Addiction (The Financial Times). Writing in the Financial Times, Tim Hartford details his experience implementing the digital declutter recommended in my book.In addition: Ryan Holiday included the book on his recent list of the 15 books you need to read in 2019, Melissa Muller called it the “beginning of a digital revolution,” and it was featured in WIRED, Boing Boing and Mike Allen’s Axios AM Newsletter.

The above is just the pre-publication coverage, with a lot more on the way. Stay tuned…

Adam Savage and the IRL Digital Revolution

Myth Confirmed

I recently started re-watching old Mythbusters episodes with my two oldest boys — and we’re having a blast.

The original series, which ran on the Discovery Channel from 2006 to 2016, was hosted by special effects engineers Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage. Curious about what happened to Jamie and Adam after the series ended, I did a little poking around and discovered that among many other things, Adam became involved in the maker website Tested.com, which was rebranded as “Adam Savage’s Tested.”

This site hosts videos which are primarily a mix of high tech product reviews and instructions for maker projects. My oldest son and I, for example, got a kick out of watching a tutorial where Adam modified an off-the-shelf Nerf gun into a 1000-shot blaster (see above).

The reason I’m bringing this up is because I’ve recently begun reading the questions submitted by members of the Digital Minimalist Book Club.

An issue that arises frequently in these queries is the ambiguous tension between the digital and the analog. I’ve been writing recently about the damage caused when low quality digital distraction push more meaningful and satisfying analog activities out of your life.

As I detail in Digital Minimalism, for example, one of the most commonly reported experiences from last year’s 1,600 person digital declutter experiment was the surprising joy of rediscovering leisure activities that used to be unexceptional, like reading random library books, knitting, or building something with your hands. Participants were often shocked to realize the degree to which these simple but fulfilling pasttimes had been push aside by mindless streaming and outraged commenting.

These observations seems to pit the analog against the digital. So how, then, do we think about Adam Savage’s Tested?

My conclusion: with great appreciation.

The goal of Tested.com is to connect maker geeks to the type of esoteric information that enables them to return to their real world shops and build a pretty damn good replica of the snub-nosed blaster from Blade Runner.

It’s a digital boost to the quality of their analog life.

More generally, there any number of similar sites, apps and gadgets out there that do a great job of taking things you already really value in the real world (IRL) and then helping you do them much better.

To a digital minimalist, this is the main point of the internet: to make life better, not to take it over.

When people accuse us of being luddites because we’re not interested in yelling at people on Twitter, they’re missing the point.

We don’t dislike digital, but our definition of success for these new technologies is not maximizing likes, it’s instead increasing the frequency with which we can replicate the smile on Adam Savage’s face when he lets loose with his custom-built 1000-shot Nerf blaster.

Why You Should Pre-Order Digital Minimalism

A copy of my new book, hot off the presses, on the custom-built minimalist library table I use to find focus in an otherwise noisy world.

My new book, Digital Minimalism, which comes out on February 5th, is available for pre-order.

If you live in the US, you can pre-order from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or a local bookstore (as well as many other retailers).

If you live in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, India or Africa, you can pre-order the UK edition at Amazon UK. (The book is also being translated into over a dozen different languages, but these will come later.)

For multiple reasons, pre-orders are much more useful than normal sales, so if you were already thinking about buying my new book, I want to humbly nudge toward considering a pre-order, and if you already pre-ordered, I want to underscore my gratitude.

To demonstrate my sincere thanks to those who take the time to help my book in this manner, I’ve put together the following incentive packages:

If you pre-order 1 copy of the book before February 5th, you’ll receive:

A video tutorial, narrated by me, that provides an inside look at the specific productivity systems I use to organize my work week. A standalone guide to the Digital Declutter process (as featured in the New York Times and detailed in my book) that I recommend for transitioning into a digital minimalist lifestyle.A 40% discount code for the Freedom internet blocking software profiled in the book. Claim your 1 copy bonuses here…

If you pre-order 2+ copies of the book (one for you and one for a friend) before February 5th, you’ll receive:

All of the above bonuses.Access to the private Digital Minimalist Book Club. For one month after the book releases in February, I’ll be be posting a weekly private video for book club members where I answer their questions about the book (or any related topics), submitted through a special email address provided only to book club members. Claim your 2+ copy bonuses here…

TO ACCESS THE BONUSES:

Pre-order Digital Minimalism from any retailer and in any format. If you have already pre-ordered (thank you!), you just need to find your invoice number from the digital receipt.Fill out THIS FORM with your invoice number(s) and contact details. (Note: If you ordered 2+ copies using multiple different orders, that’s no problem: the form can accept multiple invoice numbers.)Gain immediate access to the bonuses. Once you’ve filled out the above form, links for downloading the bonuses will appear on the form’s confirmation page.  For those of you who order 2+ copies, you’ll also be provided the special email address for submitting questions for the book club. The instructions for how to access the book club videos will then be emailed to you in February.

Are Smartphones Necessary Anymore?

When I was researching Digital Minimalism, I came across an interesting article written by Vlad Savov for The Verge. It was titled: “It’s time to bring back the dumb phone.”

I’ve both read and written numerous articles about the negative aspects of the modern smartphone, and have interviewed many people who have returned to a simpler alternative with few regrets.

But what caught my attention about Savov’s piece was the following new (to me) argument he made in favor of stepping back from these devices:

“This is not as drastic a regression as you might think — or as it might have been a few years ago. In the age before paper-thin tablets and laptops, your smartphone truly was the only viable connected device you could carry around everywhere.

But nowadays? I have paper pads thicker and heavier than the Apple MacBook…[y]ou can tuck a tablet discreetly into a large jacket pocket, and it can connect to LTE networks.”

Like Proust’s Madeleine, this comment sparked in me memories of the early smartphone era; a time when laptops were large, bulky affairs and accessible WiFi connections scarce. In this context, a “smart” phone that might allow you to send an email or perform rudimentary document edits could significantly improve your productivity when away from the office.

But as Savov notes, there are now many other affordable, portable, connected devices that offer much better productivity experiences than even the largest phone.

So why do smartphones persist in a world where their original rationale has dissipated?

My current theory: Steve Jobs.

When Jobs returned to Apple computer in an interim position in 1996, the company was still competing in the business productivity market. Indeed, one of Jobs’s first actions was to accept a $150 million dollar investment from Microsoft and form a partnership to maintain a Mac version of Microsoft Office.

But starting with the 1998 release of the iMac, Jobs began executing his vision to transform the company into a consumer brand. By 2000, he effectively eliminated the Mac clone market and shut down the productivity-focused Newton and OpenDoc projects.

In 2001, the iPod was introduced. In 2006, the iTunes store sold its billionth song.

It’s in this context that Apple began developing the iPhone: a smartphone conceived from the start as a consumer lifestyle product. The reason people lined up outside Apple stores for this device’s initial release was not because they cared about getting more done on the go, but because they wanted to be a part of the shiny new chrome-case digital culture it represented.

We’re used to this idea today, but it really was radical back in 2007.

This history is important to revisit because it reminds us of the shaky foundation on which our current culture’s compulsive smartphone habits are built.

The original smartphones solved a real problem: how do I check in on work when away from my office computer? This problem is now better solved by more recent innovations.

The communication devices that dominate our time and attention today, by contrast, are mainly used for novel behaviors, like compulsive social media checking, that were developed specifically to exploit the trend of non-business users craving fancier phones.

Which brings us back to Vlad Savov’s article. He asks if it’s time to bring back the dumb phone. If we return to thinking of these gadgets in a more purely instrumental sense — that is, asking what important problems they solve — then, perhaps to our surprise, we might find ourselves wondering why the appropriate answer is not just a simple “yes.”

(Photo by Leon Lee.)

Join Analog Social Media

A phenomenon I noticed when researching Digital Minimalism is that many people are confused by the creeping unease they feel about their digital lives. This confusion is caused in part by problems of scope.

When you take an activity like social media, for example, and zoom in close, you isolate behaviors like commenting on a friend’s picture, or encountering an interesting link, that seem mildly positive. What harm could their possibly be in clicking a heart icon?

When you zoom out, however, the cumulative effect of all this swiping and tapping seems to add up to something distinctly negative. Few are happy, for example, after allowing yet another movie night to devolve into side-by-side iPad idling.

The dynamic at play here is that digital activities that are mildly positive in isolation, combine to crowd out other real world activities that are potentially much more satisfying. This is what allows you to love Twitter in the moment when you discover a hilarious tweet, but at the end of the day fear that the app is degrading your soul.

Understanding this dynamic is critical because it tells you that you cannot improve your life by focusing exclusively on digital tools. Triaging your apps, or cutting back phone time, will not by itself make you happier. You must also aggressively fill in the space this pruning creates with the type of massively satisfying, real world activities that these tools have been increasingly pushing out of your life.

It is with this in mind, and in the spirit of the New Year, that I suggest you make a simple resolution: join analog social media.

As I’ve discussed before, analog social media describes organizations, activities and traditions that require you to interact with interesting people and encounter interesting things in the real world.

Here are some examples:

Join a local political group that meets regularly to organize on issues relevant to your local community, or serve as a volunteer on the election campaign of a local politician you know and like.Join a social fitness group, like a running club, or local CrossFit box.Become a museum or theater member and attend openings.Go to at least one author talk per month at a local bookstore.Create a book club, or poker group, or gaming club.Join a committee at your church/temple/mosque.Establish a weekly brunch or happy hour with your close friends.

These types of activities tend to provide significantly more value in your life than their digital counterparts. Indeed, tools like online social media are probably best understood as weak online simulacrums of the analog encounters that we know deep down we need to thrive as humans.

Equally important, as I learned during last year’s big digital declutter experiment (summarized here; detailed here), the more analog social media you introduce into your life, the more bulwarks you establish against the creeping demands of the digital.

With nothing else in place to fill your time, your phone will become increasingly irresistible, regardless of your intentions to spend more time disconnected. When you instead introduce meaningful analog activity into your regular routine, the appeal of the screen suddenly diminishes.

To summarize: if you’re vaguely unhappy with your digital life, respond by introducing much more positive real world activity. If you embrace analog social media, you’ll soon be wondering how you ever dedicated so much time to its inferior digital equivalent.

From the Hyperlink to the Stream: Hossein Derakshan’s Critique of the Internet in the Age of Social Media

The Six Year Transformation

A friend recently pointed me toward an essay published on Medium in 2015. It’s written by Hossein Derakshan, a Canadian-Iranian blogger who helped instigate the Persian-language blogging revolution during the first decade of the 21st century, and whose online truth-telling eventually lead to his imprisonment in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison from 2008 to 2014.

In his essay, Derakshan explores the radical shift in internet culture that occurred between when he entered prison in 2008 and his release six years later. As Derakshan explains, in 2008, the source of the internet’s potency was the hyperlink:

“The hyperlink was my currency six years ago…[it] provided a diversity and decentralisation that the real world lacked. The hyperlink represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web…a way to abandon centralization — all the links, lines and hierarchies — and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks.”

If the hyperlink was “currency,” as Derakshan elaborates, then blogs were the market in which this currency was exchanged. You might start a web browsing session at a site you knew well, but a few dozen clicks later might find yourself at a novel corner of the blogosphere, digesting insights from a bright mind you would have never otherwise known existed.

When Derakshan emerged from prison in 2014, however, the internet had changed. Social media had dethroned the blog, and in doing so, replaced the hyperlink’s central position within online culture with something altogether new, “The Stream.”

As he details:

“The Stream now dominates the way people receive information on the web. Fewer users are directly checking dedicated webpages, instead getting fed by a never-ending flow of information that’s picked for them by complex — and secretive — algorithms.

The Stream means you don’t need to open so many websites any more. You don’t need numerous tabs. You don’t even need a web browser. You open Twitter or Facebook on your smartphone and dive deep in. The mountain has come to you. Algorithms have picked everything for you.”

What we lost in this shift from the hyperlink to The Stream was the ability to encounter diverse ideas, radical insight, and transformative new perspectives. What we got instead was more of what we already know, delivered like a pre-masticated paste, easy to digest and sure to please:

“[N]ot only do the algorithms behind the Stream equate newness and popularity with importance, they also tend to show us more of what we’ve already liked. These services carefully scan our behaviour and delicately tailor our news feeds with posts, pictures and videos that they think we would most likely want to see.”

Derakshan’s analysis provides a sharp take on some of the issues I’ve been discussing in recent posts. This shift from the wild and exciting decentralized web of the 1990s and 2000’s, to the creepy, Huxley-esque walled gardens of today’s social media monopolies has many different consequences, from privacy, to distraction, to manipulation.

But as Derakshan emphasizes, perhaps one of the biggest impacts of this transformation is that it’s denuding the internet of many of the attributes that made it so disruptive and exciting in the first place.

Is YouTube Fundamental or Trivial?

The YouTube Conundrum

As a public critic of social media, I’m often asked if my concerns extend to YouTube. This is a tricky question.

As I’ve written, platforms such as Facebook and Instagram didn’t offer something fundamentally different than the world wide web that preceded them. Their main contribution was to make this style of online life more accessible and convenient.

My first independently owned and operated web site from the 1990s, for example, required me to learn HTML and upload files to a server at a local ISP using FTP. Ten years later, expressing yourself online became as easy as using your student email address to open an account at thefacebook.com, and then answering some questions about your relationship status and favorite movies.

YouTube seems different.

Before it came along, there were not many options for individuals to publish original video content online. Now this can be done for free with the click of a button, which is an important shift. Many content creators I know see the democratization of video as a force that’s shaping up to be as disruptive to traditional media as the preceding arrival of web sites.

And yet, at the same time, many of the people I spoke with while researching Digital Minimalism admitted that idle YouTube browsing is devouring more and more of their discretionary time, and they’re not happy about it.

So what’s the right way to think about YouTube: is it fundamental to the internet revolution, or just another source of social media distraction?

The best answer I can come up with for now is both.

On the positive side, video is powerful. Enabling more people to create and publish video will therefore unleash powerful creative innovation. (It will also, of course, enable the creation of more insipid and brain-dulling content as well, but this is an unavoidable feature of any publishing revolution, from Gutenberg onward).

On the negative side, YouTube’s attention economy revenue model, supercharged with statistical recommendation algorithms, creates a browsing experience that can suck you into a powerful vortex of distraction and creeping extremism that cannot possibly be healthy.

A Better Way Forward

Perhaps the best way to emphasize the positives of online video while diminishing its negatives is to deploy a hybrid indie web approach.

Imagine an online world in which people hosted their innovative video on large, big-infrastructure platforms like YouTube or Vimeo, but then embedded the players on their own independent web sites. This would allow users to find interesting new video content by leveraging the same style of decentralized trust hierarchies that structure the blogosphere, instead of relying on artificial statistical algorithms tuned to optimize attention extraction.

Because YouTube came along at exactly the moment when broadband penetration made online video practical, we never had a period of indie experimentation before the market consolidated into platform monopolies. I think it’s worth exploring what we missed.

On Blogs in the Social Media Age

Twitter Defector

Earlier this week, Glenn Reynolds, known online as Instapundit, published an op-ed in USA Today about why he recently quit Twitter. He didn’t hold back, writing:

“[I]f you set out to design a platform that would poison America’s discourse and its politics, you’d be hard pressed to come up with something more destructive than Twitter.”

What really caught my attention, however, is when Reynolds begins discussing the advantages of the blogosphere as compared to walled garden social media platforms.

He notes that blogs represent a loosely coupled system, where the friction of posting and linking slows down the discourse enough to preserve context and prevent the runaway reactions that are possible in tightly coupled systems like Twitter, where a tweet can be retweeted, then retweeted again and again, forming an exponential explosion of pure reactive id.

As a longtime blogger myself, Reynolds’s op-ed got me thinking about other differences between social media and the blogosphere…

Attention Markets

One of these differences that has consistently caught my attention is the way in which social media reconstructed the market for online attention.

Blogs implement a capitalist attention market. If you want attention for your blog you have to earn it through a combination of quality, in the sense that you’re producing something valuable for your readers, and trust, in the sense that you’ve produced enough good stuff over time to establish a good reputation with the fellow bloggers whose links will help grow your audience.

Succeeding in this market, like succeeding with a business venture, can be ruthlessly difficult. There’s lots of competition for the attention you’re trying to attract, and even skilled writers often find that something about their voice, or the timing of their topic, fails to catch on.

Social media, by contrast, implements a collectivist attention market, where the benefits of receiving attention are redistributed more uniformly to all users.

A key dynamic driving the popularity of platforms like Facebook and Instagram, for example, is the following notion: if you like me, I’ll like you. As I noted in Deep Work, if you took the contents of the standard Facebook or Instagram feed and published it on a blog, it wouldn’t attract any readers, or comments, or links. But put this content on a Facebook wall and there’s an implicit social contract in place to motivate the people you know to click a like button, or leave a nice comment in the anticipation that you’ll do the same.

Twitter is a little more complicated. A key dynamic on this platform is deconstructing “content” into small chunks that exist largely independently of the type of slowly accreting, decentralized trust hierarchies that throttle information flow in the blogosphere.

These tweets are easy to write and publish, and they can be acknowledged just as easily with a quick tap of a retweet or heart icon. By drastically lowering the bar for what “content creation” requires, and allowing content to spread in a homogenous, fluid interaction graph, many more people can experience the positive feeling of having someone pay attention to something they said.

Quality vs. Satisfaction

It’s not self-evident that one type of online media is better than the other. One advantage of a collectivist market, for example, is that it feels nice to receive attention, so spreading this experience to more people seems like a worthwhile endeavor.

Collectivist markets also potentially bring more voices into the online conversation, as the obstacles to finding an audience in the blogosphere are severe enough that some people who otherwise have something interesting to say might not bother trying to say it.

Capitalist attention markets, on the other hand, offer one decidedly important advantage: better content. To state the obvious, there are plenty of bad blogs. But in the blogosphere it’s easy to filter these from the more serious contributors that, through the traits of quality and trust cited above, distinguish themselves as worthwhile.

As any serious blog consumer can attest, a carefully curated blog feed, covering niches that matter to your life, can provide substantially more value than the collectivist ping-ponging of likes and memes that make up so much of social media interaction.

In other words, Glenn Reynolds was on to something when he stepped away from Twitter and began to reminisce about what once made blogging seem so exciting.

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As longtime readers know, I’m a big fan of Mouse Books, which prints classic books in a smartphone-sized format — allowing you to pull a deeper source of distraction out of your pocket during moments of boredom. (I actually feature Mouse Books in Digital Minimalism .)

Anyway, they just launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund their “second season” (series of books).   Definitely check it out…