Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

by Cal Newport

The constant exposure to their friends’ carefully curated portrayals of their lives generates feelings of inadequacy—especially during periods when they’re already feeling low—and for teenagers, it provides a cruelly effective way to be publicly excluded.

In an open marketplace for attention, darker emotions attract more eyeballs than positive and constructive thoughts.

This process requires you to step away from optional online activities for thirty days. During this period, you’ll wean yourself from the cycles of addiction that many digital tools can instill, and begin to rediscover the analog activities that provide you deeper satisfaction.

At the end of the thirty days, you will then add back a small number of carefully chosen online activities that you believe will provide massive benefit to these things you value.

Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking.

Addiction is a condition in which a person engages in use of a substance or in a behavior for which the rewarding effects provide a compelling incentive to repeatedly pursue the behavior despite detrimental consequences.

The article points to pathological gambling and internet addiction as two particularly well-established examples of these disorders.

First, our new technologies are particularly well suited to foster behavioral addictions.

Just as Tristan Harris warned, in many cases these addictive properties of new technologies are not accidents, but instead carefully engineered design features.

Something about unpredictability releases more dopamine—a key neurotransmitter for regulating our sense of craving.

Take a thirty-day break from any of these technologies that you deem “optional”—meaning that you can step away from them without creating harm or major problems in either your professional or personal life.

During this monthlong process, you must aggressively explore higher-quality activities to fill in the time left vacant by the optional technologies you’re avoiding.

With this in mind, for each optional technology that you’re considering reintroducing into your life, you must first ask: Does this technology directly support something that I deeply value?

The premise of this chapter is that by cultivating a high-quality leisure life first, it will become easier to minimize low-quality digital diversions later.