Cal Newport's Blog, page 6

On Kids and Smartphones

Not long ago, my kids’ school asked me to give a talk to middle school students and their parents about smartphones. I’ve written extensively on the intersection of technology and society in both my books and New Yorker articles, but the specific issue of young people and phones is one I’ve only tackled on a small number of occasions (e.g., here and here). This invited lecture therefore provided me a great opportunity to bring myself up to speed on the research relevant to this topic.

I was fascinated by what I discovered.

In my talk, I ended up not only summarizing the current state-of-the-art thinking about kids and phones, but also diving into the history of this literature, including how it got started, evolved, adjusted to criticism, and, over the last handful of years, ultimately coalesced around a rough consensus.

Assuming that other people might find this story interesting, I recorded a version of this talk for Episode 246 of my podcast, Deep Questions. Earlier today, I also released it as a standalone video. If you’re concerned, or even just interested, in what researchers currently believe to be true about the dangers involved in giving a phone to a kid before they’re ready, I humbly suggest watching my presentation.

In the meantime, I thought it might be useful to summarize a few of the more interesting observations that I uncovered:

Concern that young people were becoming more anxious, and that smartphones might be playing a role, began to bubble up among mental health professionals and educators starting around 2012. It was, as much as anything else, Jean Twenge’s 2017 cover story for The Atlantic, titled “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”, that subsequently shoved this concern into the broader cultural conversation.Between 2017 and 2020, a period I call The Data Wars, there were many back-and-forth fights in the research literature, in which harms would be identified, followed by critics pushing back and arguing that the harms were exaggerated, followed then by responses to these critiques. This was normal and healthy: exactly the empirical thrust and parry you want to see in the early stages of an emerging scientific hypothesis. Over the last few years, a rough consensus has emerged that there really are significant harms in giving young people unrestricted access to the internet through smartphones. This is particularly true for pre-pubescent girls. This consensus arose in part because the main critiques raised during The Data Wars were resoundingly answered, and because, more recently, multiple independent threads of inquiry (including natural experiments, randomized controlled trials, and self-report data) all pointed toward the same indications of harm.The research community concerned about these issues are converging on the idea that the safe age to give a kid unrestricted access to a smartphone is 16. (The Surgeon General recently suggested something similar.)You might guess that the middle school students who attended my talk balked at this conclusion, but reality is more complicated. They didn’t fully embrace my presentation, but they didn’t reject it either. Many professed to recognize the harms of unrestricted internet access at their age and are wary about it. (My oldest son, by contrast, who is 10, is decidedly not happy with me for spreading these vile lies at his school.)

This is clearly a fascinating and complicated topic that seems to be rapidly evolving. If you’re struggling with these developments, I hope you find my talk somewhat useful. I’m convinced that our culture will eventually adapt to these issues. Ten years from now, there won’t be much debate about what’s appropriate when it comes to kids and these technologies. Until then, however, we’re all sort of on our own, so the more we know, the better off we’ll be.

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Danielle Steel and the Tragic Appeal of Overwork

Based on a tip from a reader, I recently tumbled down an esoteric rabbit hole aimed at the writing habits of the novelist Danielle Steel. Even if you don’t read Steel, you’ve almost certainly heard of her work. One of the best-selling authors of all time, Steel has written more than 190 books that have cumulatively sold over 800 million copies. She publishes multiple titles per year, often juggling up to five projects simultaneously. Unlike James Patterson, however, who also pushes out multiple books per year, Steel writes every word of every manuscript by herself.

How does she pull this off? She works all the time. According to a 2019 Glamour profile, Steel starts writing at 8:30 am and will continue all day and into the night. It’s not unusual for her to spend 20 to 22 hours at her desk. She eats one piece of toast for breakfast and nibbles on bittersweet chocolate bars for lunch. A sign in her office reads: “There are no miracles. There is only discipline.”

These details fascinate me. Steel is phenomenally successful, but her story reads like a Greek tragedy. She could, of course, decide to only write a single book per year, and still be a fabulously bestselling author, while also, you know, sleeping. Indeed, her cultural impact might even increase if she slowed down, as this extra breathing room might allow her to more carefully apply her abundant talent.

But there’s a primal action-reward feedback loop embedded into the experience of disciplined effort leading to success. Once you experience its pleasures it’s natural to crave more. For Steel, this dynamic seems to have spiraled out of control. Like King Midas, lost in his gilded loneliness, Steel cannot leave the typewriter. She earned everything she hoped for, but in the process she lost the ability to step away and enjoy it.

I think this dynamic, to one degree or another, impacts anyone who has been fortunate enough to experience some success in their field. Doing important work matters and sometimes this requires sacrifices. But there’s also a deep part of our humanity that responds to these successes — and the positive feedback they generate — by pushing us to seek this high at ever-increasing frequencies.

One of the keys to cultivating a deep life seems to be figuring out how to ride this razor’s edge; to avoid the easy cynicism of dismissing effort altogether, while also avoiding Steel’s 20-hour days. This is an incredibly hard challenge, yet it’s one that receives limited attention and generates almost no formal instruction. I don’t have a simple solution but I thought it was worth emphasizing. For a notable subset of talented individuals burnout is less about their exploitation by others than it is their uneasy dialogue with themselves.

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My Thoughts on ChatGPT

In recent months, I’ve received quite a few emails from readers expressing concerns about ChatGPT. I remained quiet on this topic, however, as I was writing a big New Yorker piece on this technology and didn’t want to scoop my own work. Earlier today, my article was finally published, so now I’m free to share my thoughts.

If you’ve been following the online discussion about these new tools you might have noticed that the rhetoric about their impact has been intensifying. What started as bemused wonder about ChatGPT’s clever answers to esoteric questions moved to fears about how it could be used to cheat on tests or eliminate jobs before finally landing on calls, in the pages of the New York Times, for world leaders to “respond to this moment at the level of challenge it presents,” buying us time to “learn to master AI before it masters us.”

The motivating premise of my New Yorker article is the belief that this cycle of increasing concern is being fueled, in part, by a lack of a deep understanding about how this latest generation of chatbots actually operate. As I write:

“Only by taking the time to investigate how this technology actually works—from its high-level concepts down to its basic digital wiring—can we understand what we’re dealing with. We send messages into the electronic void, and receive surprising replies. But what, exactly, is writing back?”

I then spend several thousand words trying to detail the key ideas that explain how the large language models that drive tools like ChatGPT really function. I’m not, of course, going to replicate all of that exposition here, but I do want to briefly summarize two relevant conclusions:

ChatGPT is almost certainly not going to take your job. Once you understand how it works, it becomes clear that ChatGPT’s functionality is crudely reducible to the following: it can write grammatically-correct text about an arbitrary combination of known subjects in an arbitrary combination of known styles, where “known” means it encountered it sufficiently many times in its training data. This ability can produce impressive chat transcripts that spread virally on Twitter, but it’s not useful enough to disrupt most existing jobs. The bulk of the writing that knowledge workers actually perform tends to involve bespoke information about their specific organization and field. ChatGPT can write a funny poem about a peanut butter sandwich, but it doesn’t know how to write an effective email to the Dean’s office at my university with a subtle question about our hiring policies.ChatGPT is absolutely not self-aware, conscious, or alive in any reasonable definition of these terms. The large language model that drives ChatGPT is static. Once it’s trained, it does not change; it’s a collection of simply-structured (though massive in size) feed-forward neural networks that do nothing but take in text as input and spit out new words as output. It has no malleable state, no updating sense of self, no incentives, no memory. It’s possible that we might one day day create a self-aware AI (keep an eye on this guy), but if such an intelligence does arise, it will not be in the form of a large language model.

I’m sure that I will have more thoughts to share on AI going forward. In the meantime, I recommend that you check out my article, if you’re able. For now, however, I’ll leave you with some concluding thoughts from my essay.

“It’s hard to predict exactly how these large language models will end up integrated into our lives going forward, but we can be assured that they’re incapable of hatching diabolical plans, and are unlikely to undermine our economy,” I wrote. “ChatGPT is amazing, but in the final accounting it’s clear that what’s been unleashed is more automaton than golem.”

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On Taylor Koekkoek’s Defiant Disconnection

An article appearing last month in the Los Angeles Times book section opens with a nondescript picture of a young man in a Hawaiian shirt standing in front of a brick wall. The caption is arresting: “Taylor Koekkoek is one of the best short-story writers of his (young) generation. So why haven’t you heard of him?”

On March 21st, Koekkoek (pronounced, cook-cook) published his debut short story collection, Thrillville, USA. Those who have read it seem to love it. The Paris Review called it a “raw and remarkable debut story collection.” The author of the LA Times piece braved a blizzard in a rental car just for the chance to interview Koekkoek at his Oregon house. And yet, the book has so far escaped wide notice: At the time of this writing, its Amazon rank is around 175,000.

The LA Times provides some insight into this state of affairs:

“A Google search reveals very little about the writer: a few published stories, no social media trail, author bios at a handful of universities that feature the same photo of an amiable-looking young white man in a Hawaiian shirt. If one were to make up an identity for a fictitious writer, the results would resemble something like the sum total of Koekkoek’s online experience.” [emphasis mine]

It’s possible that Koekkoek will go on to make the standard moves for someone his age: engaging in social media, creating waves online, brashly carving out an audience. (Indeed, since his book came out, he seems to have started an Instagram account that currently features three posts.) But there’s a part of me that hopes he resists this well-worn path; that he continues to let his soulful words speak for themselves, and that, ultimately, the sheer quality of what he’s doing wins him grand recognition.

This would be a nice counterpoint to our current moment of instinctive self-promotion. A reminder for the rest of us, nervous about slipping into digital oblivion, that what ultimately matters is the fundamental value of what we produce. Everything else is distraction.

In other news…

My apologies for my recent radio silence on this newsletter. In a coincidence of scheduling, of the type that happens now and again, I had an academic, magazine, and book-related deadline all fall into the same three-week period, so something had to give. I should be back to a more normal pace of posting now.I suppose I should mention that, a few weeks ago, I was profiled by the Financial Times Weekend Magazine. Believe it or not, I was the cover story (!?). You can read it here.

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Meta Rediscovers the Cubicle

Back in 2016, I reported on a rumor that was circulating about employee dissatisfaction at Meta (then, Facebook). Developers, it seemed, were unhappy with the company’s trendy, but also unbearably noisy and distracting, 8-acre open office floor plan.

“Developers need to concentrate,” explained an amused Joel Spolsky at a conference that year, before going on to add that Facebook was paying a 40 – 50% premium for talent because people didn’t want to work under those conditions. A commentator on my essay pointed to a podcast episode where Facebook insiders claim that the open office was never more than 30% occupied. “Apparently, the majority of people that work there make sure that they are away from their desk when they need to get work done,” he explained.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal last month, it looks like Meta is finally ready to do something about this self-inflicted problem. After hiring a fancy design firm and working through multiple ideas and prototypes they landed on an innovative solution: cubicles.

(To be fair, the company takes pains to argue that their solution is not cubicles, because, well, the walls are curved, and they are made out of fancier, sound-absorbing materials. Sure. Okay…)

I, for one, am pleased by this news. The open office boom is right up there with the spread of Slack as representing the peak of early 21st century distraction culture — a period in which the knowledge sector completely disregarded any realities about how human brains actually go about the difficult task of creating value through cogitation. The fact that Meta is closing the book on its ill-fated open office experiment is perhaps a glimmer of hope that we’re moving toward a deeper future

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In other news…

On Monday, Scott Young and I are re-opening our popular online course, Life of Focus, which combines ideas from Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and Scott’s excellent book, Ultralearning. For those who are interested, registration will be open Monday until Friday at the course site.

A quick word of warning: I am going to send three short emails about the course throughout the week, so be ready for that. (Each such message will also includes a link at the bottom you can click to opt-out of any future communication about the course. )

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On Section 230 and the Dream of a More Human Internet

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court heard arguments on a case that has the potential to fundamentally reshape the internet as we know it. As you might expect, this caught my attention.

The focus of the case is a single sentence, found in Section 230(c)(1) of 1996’s Communications Decency Act:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

This so-called Section 230 has since been interpreted through multiple court rulings as providing broad immunity from liability for internet platforms that publish content from third-party users. If I defame you in a Tweet, in other words, you cannot sue Twitter.

The case in question was brought against Google by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a college student who was killed in a terrorist attack in 2015. The Gonzalez family claims that the terrorists responsible for their son’s death had been radicalized by videos recommend on YouTube, and therefore Google, which owns YouTube, should be held liable.

At the core of their argument is that Section 230’s protections should not extend to information recommended by algorithms. There’s a difference, the lawyer for the Gonzalez family argued, between passively hosting third-party content, such as on a bulletin board, and actively pushing it toward users, such as what happens on social media services.

The consensus from legal journalists (e.g., this comprehensive take from Adam Liptak) seems to be that the Supreme Court justices sounded unlikely to pursue an aggressive ruling.

“You know, these are not like the nine greatest experts on the internet,” admitted Elena Kagan.

“[A strong ruling against Section 230] would really crash the digital economy with all sorts of effects on workers and consumers, retirement plans and what have you,” worried Brett Kavanaugh.

The Justices instead signaled that such clarifications really should be an issue for the legislative branch to address, not the courts. This is all quite reasonable. But reading the coverage of these arguments, I couldn’t help but indulge in some day dreaming.

Imagine if the Supreme Court threw caution to the wind and radically rolled back Section 230 protections; to the point where it became legally unviable to operate any sort of major platform that harvests attention using algorithmic-curation of user-generated content. In this thought experiment, Facebook disappears, along with Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, and even YouTube.

This certainly would devastate the tech sector for a while. It would also hurt the portfolios of those invested in these companies. But what would the impact be on the average internet user? It might not actually be so bad.

You would still have access to all of the traditional news sites and streaming services that are based around old fashioned notions like editors and actually paying people for the content they produce for you. You would also still have access to the recently energized independent media sector, which would continue to thrive through individually-owned podcasts and email newsletters.

What about personal expression? This would shift back to individually-hosted sites that, for a handful of dollars a month, could easily support user posts including text, images and video. Presumably a new generation of RSS-style feed readers would emerge that allow you to browse these sites using attractive phone apps. In the absence of social-network virality, you would discover interesting people and feeds the way we did back in 2005, through a combination of links, serendipity, and word-of-mouth.

What would be missing in this shift from an algorithmic to human internet are many of the darker aspects of contemporary online life, such as slack-jawed addictiveness, or the dynamics that push people toward the worst versions of themselves and away from the humanity of their fellow man.

All of this, of course, is bathed in utopian wistful thinking. A trillion dollar industry won’t just disappear because of a reduced liability shield. Such a shift would also generate untold number of unexpected side effects, such as an exponential increase in nuance lawsuits, or the emergence of newer, even more insidious forms of attention extraction.

But I enjoyed this day dream while it unfolded. It reminded me that the internet we stumbled into over the past 25 years isn’t destiny. There are other options for how this grand network of networks might operate. We shouldn’t be so quick to accept the status quo.

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In other news…

In the most recent episode of my podcast, Deep Questions, I explore strategies for leveraging remote work arrangements to significantly reduce the time your job requires.A talented filmmaker I know named Sara Robin is looking for participants for a documentary she’s filming about digital minimalism. In her words: “We are currently seeking participants who want to try out digital minimalism. If you are looking to reduce your digital media consumption and are interested to be involved in the film, we would love to hear from you!”  If you’re interested and want to find out more, email Sara directly: saraxrobin@gmail.com

 

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Pliny the Younger on Happy and Honorable Seclusion

A reader recently pointed me toward an intriguing letter, reproduced a few weeks ago in the always-impressive Areopagus newsletter, that was originally sent from Pliny the Younger to his friend Minicius Fundanus around 100 AD. Among other topics, the letter touches on the difficulty of completing meaningful work in a distracted world.

As Pliny writes:

“I always realize [that city life is distracting] when I am at Laurentum, reading and writing and finding time to take the exercise which keeps my mind fit for work. There is nothing there for me to say or hear which I would afterwards regret, no one disturbs me with malicious gossip, and I have no one to blame — except myself — when writing doesn’t come easily. Hopes and fears do not worry me, and my time is not wasted in idle talk; I share my thoughts with no one but my books. It is a good life and a genuine one, a seclusion which is happy and honorable, more rewarding than any “business” can ever be. The sea and shore are my private Helicon, an endless source of inspiration.”

Pliny’s advice led me to do some more digging on what exactly he meant when he quipped: “when I am at Laurentum.” It turns out that Pliny maintained a rambling villa on the sea, southwest of Rome. According to an article I found, written by a British architect, Pliny’s property had been specifically configured to support focus:

“Away from the main body of the Villa, but connected to it by means of a covered arcade, is Pliny’s Retreat – a place where he can write in peace away from all distractions…I’ve shown the Retreat as a circular room with arms making the shape of a Greek cross. Pliny could then position himself wherever he liked to catch the light and the view from sunrise to sunset as he wrote.  He valued writing above everything else to him it was the most important part of the Villa.”

We shouldn’t, of course, be too literal in extracting practical advice from the life of Pliny the Younger. As a member of a lower aristocratic order in Classical Antiquity, Pliny’s life, in its details, is far different than, say, the standard middle-class twenty-first century knowledge worker. In other words, me telling you to build an outbuilding modeled after the Greek cross away from the main structures of your seaside villa might not evince appreciation.

But I did find it fascinating that even as far back as two thousand years ago, those who made a living with their mind (Pliny was a magistrate and lawyer) struggled with distraction, and found solace in the pursuit of something deeper.

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In other news…

In the most recent episode of my podcast, Deep Questions, I tackle the tension between ambition and burnout, describing a model for pursuing the former while avoiding the latter.

YouTube superstar (and former doctor) Ali Abdaal also released an interview with me in which we discussed the challenges of leaving a well-worn path to pursue something new.

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On Email and Horses

Earlier this week, the New York Times Magazine published a conversation between me and the journalist David Marchese.  We touched on a lot of the ideas about digital technology and the workplace that I elaborate in my 2021 book, A World Without Email.

At one point during the interview, however, I came up with a new metaphor on the fly, which now, looking back, I recognize as potentially adding a useful new wrinkle to my thinking on these topics. Here’s the exchange:

Marchese:  But hasn’t the cultural-technological ship sailed when it comes to this stuff? Or, to mix metaphors, part of me is wondering if what you’re suggesting is a little like saying that getting from place to place by horse is a lot more cognitively rewarding and humane than driving everywhere — which may be true, but no one’s going back to horses. What company is going to tell its employees to cut back on email and Slack?

Me: The right metaphor here is not “Let’s stick with horses, even though automobiles are around,” because automobiles were clearly a more energy and monetarily efficient way of moving things from A to B, just like email is clearly a more efficient way for me to deliver a memo to you than a fax machine. The metaphor is that it took a while before we figured out traffic rules and understood that it can’t just be cars going wild through the street. Eventually we figured out we need stoplights and lanes and traffic enforcement.

Almost by definition, if a technology rapidly spreads it’s because it’s doing something notably better than what came before it — be it delivering business information or drool-bucket distraction. Given this reality, nostalgia is often counter-productive: returning to an older generation of tools, in most cases, would be returning to less effective tools.

What trips us up, however, is when we leap from this solid observation to the shaky conclusion that new technologies should therefore be left alone to infiltrate our culture without checks or guidance. Email is clearly better than intra-office mail and fax machines, but does this mean work should require us to check an inbox once every six minutes? An iPhone is clearly a superior device to a Nokia Razr, but does this mean 12-year-olds should be using them? Cars are clearly more efficient than horses, but should I be allowed to drive 60 mph down a quiet residential street?

The right question is not, is this useful? But instead, how do we want to use it?

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In other news…

In the most recent episode of my podcast, Deep Questions, I discuss recent research that shows lumberjacks are significantly more happy than lawyers, and then attempt to extract lessons from this data about how best to craft a meaningful professional life.

In my recent appearance on Sam Harris’s podcast, Making Sense, I gave Sam my argument why I though he should leave Twitter. A few days later: he did! I can’t actually take credit for Sam’s decision (he had been pondering it for a while), but it was a fun conversation nonetheless.

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Guillermo del Toro’s Inspiration Machine

When the Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro was a boy growing up in Guadalajara, his mother bought him a Victorian-style writing desk. “I kept my comic books in the drawers, my books and horror action figures on the shelves, and my writing and drawing stuff on the desk,” Del Toro recalled in a 2016 profile. “I guess that was the first, smallest version of my collection.”

As the director began to find success as an adult with his beautifully imagined, macabre fantasies, like Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth and Nightmare Alley, he was able to indulge his collecting instinct more seriously, amassing “a vast physical collection of strange and wonderful memorabilia.” Eventually, Del Toro’s objects became too much to manage.

As he explained in an NPR interview:

“We were living in a three-bedroom house and I magically had occupied four spaces. So it came to a point where the collection was much bigger than the family life. I was hanging up a picture, a really creepy painting by Richard Corben. My wife says, ‘That’s too close to the kitchen, the kids are gonna be freaked out.'”

So Del Toro took the natural next step: he bought a second house in the same neighborhood. His plan was to use the new residence to organize and store his growing collection and provide a quiet place for him to work. As an homage to Charles Dickens, he called it Bleak House.

By 2016, Bleak House contained over 10,000 items, including artwork, sculptures, artifacts and movies. It also featured thirteen different reference libraries. Housed in a room dedicated to a haunted mansion theme, for example, are Del Toro’s books on mythology, folklore, and fairy tales. The screening room boasts over 7,000 DVDs. One space includes a simulated rain storm that pours outside a fake window. This latter location is one of Del Toro’s favorite places to write.

What interests me about this story is less its eccentricity than its pragmatism.  As Del Toro explained in a video tour of the house, he was inspired by the original research library built at Disney Studios, and in particular, its philosophy that “when you create a group of extraordinary artists, you should definitely feed their imagination with all sorts of images.”

Del Toro designed Bleak House to fuel the creativity on which his career depends. “It’s here to try to provoke a sort of a shock to the system,” he said, “and aid in circulation of the lifeblood of imagination, which is curiosity.”

Truly deep work — the type that redefines genres — is truly hard. In such efforts, our brain needs all the help it can get.

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In other news: in the most recent episode of my podcast, Deep Questions, I tackled thirteen questions in a row, including one on developing discipline and another on planning projects with unpredictable time demands. Are you listening to Deep Questions yet? If not, you should be!

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On Quiet Quitting

In my latest essay for The New Yorker, published earlier this week, I tackled the topic of “quiet quitting.” This idea careened into mainstream discourse last summer, powered by a viral TikTok video posted by a twentysomething engineer named Zaid Khan.

Here’s the transcript:

“I recently heard about this idea of quiet quitting where, you’re not quitting your job, but quitting the idea of going above and beyond at work.

You’re still performing your duties, but you’re not subscribing to the hustle culture mentality that your work is your life.

The reality is that it’s not. And your worth as a person is not defined by your labor.”

Khan’s earnest declarations earned him acclaim on TikTok, where numerous other videos took up the theme; some outraged in tone, others satiric.  As word of the trend spread beyond social media, mainstream commentators weren’t so nice. In a CNBC appearance, Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary described quiet quitting as “worse than COVID.”

It was exactly this confused reaction to this trend that caught my interest. As I note in my article, when it comes to quiet quitting, “we’re simultaneously baffled and enthusiastic.” I set out to understand why.

I don’t want to spoil all of my conclusions, but here’s a high-level summary of my thesis: quiet quitting represents Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) taking their turn at a reckoning with work that older generations have already gone through.

It’s easy, in other words, for us Millennials to be smug about the college seminar sincerity of this movement  — your worth as a person is not defined by your labor! — but it wasn’t that long ago that we were convinced that running remote businesses in Tulum was the right response to economic disruptions of the post-9/11 world.

Every generation reaches a point where they begin to think more critically about what role, exactly, work should play in their life. This process often starts with wild ideas, but eventually settles down into something more nuanced. “Quiet quitting is the messy starting gun of a new generation embarking on this challenge,” I conclude. We shouldn’t be anything other than happy that Gen Z is now joining this race, even if this might require us to ignore the specifics of what they’re saying at the moment.

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In the latest episode of my Deep Questions podcast (#228), I tackle the possibility of a “world without busyness,” and answer audience questions on a variety of topics, from the role of social media in marketing, to dealing with demands for after-hours work.

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