Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

by Cal Newport

Digital Minimalism A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

if your life consists only of actions whose “worth depends on the existence of problems, difficulties, needs, which these activities aim to solve,” you’re vulnerable to the existential despair that blooms in response to the inevitable question, Is this all there is to life?

This distress is often explained in the terminology of addiction, in which it can be cast as withdrawal symptoms experienced by an addict.

This combination of abundant free time and commitment to intentional living makes this group an ideal source of insight into effective leisure.

I never understood the joy of watching other people play sports, can’t stand tourist attractions, don’t sit on the beach unless there’s a really big sand castle that needs to be made, [and I] don’t care about what the celebrities and politicians are doing. . . . Instead of all this, I seem to get satisfaction only from making stuff. Or maybe a better description would be solving problems and making improvements.

Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.

Leisure Lesson #2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world. SUPERCHARGED SOCIALITY Another common property of high-quality leisure is its ability to support rich social interactions.

For the many different reasons argued in the preceding pages, investing energy into something hard but worthwhile almost always returns much richer rewards.